God’s blessing to you on this the twenty first day of January in the year of our Lord’s incarnation 2017.

Previously I talked about my new mirror lens. In that post I said I’d put up some pictures taken with it. I did manage to take a few. I’m still learning how to use lens, and I think that my manual focusing is rusty, so the pictures didn’t look very good at full size, but since I think that they shrink down to decent photos, I’ve decided to put the four best up here.

The first is macro-photography of the trunk of my ficus. The minimal focal distance is about 1.5 meters, so at 500mm, it’s hardly the lens to take picture’s of a fly’s eye, but it gets closer than many lenses do. Incredibly short focal depth at that distance, though. (That’s a problem with most macro photography, though.)

The next is the roof of a shed my neighbor has. It’s been up for a long time, and has accumulated some interesting lichens. (I should note that it was a grey, overcast day.)

The clouds were looking interesting, so I decided to try some cloud photos. I figured that since they were so far away at the very least I should have a decent depth of field. On the other hand, my not being very skilled at manual focusing didn’t help.

And finally while I was out shooting, a red-tailed hawk landed on my neighbor’s roof to look for mice in the yards around it. Unfortunately I didn’t get any great photos, but this wasn’t bad:

I was shooting at 1600 iso to get a 1/400th shutter speed, which is still sub-optimal for a 500mm lens. I suspect that when taking photos of living subjects, I really need a bright sunny day to get enough light to shoot at a fast shutter speed and low ISO (the higher the ISO, the more noise you get). If I get a chance to take pictures on a bright sunny day, I’ll post some of those for comparison. And I suspect that I need to practice at manual focusing, too.

Glory to God in the highest.