Testing Minolta MD 100mm/4.0 Macro

[miran]

I bought this lens quite a while ago but only now managed to snap the first few test photos. I missed almost the whole bug macro season!

What can I say? The lens is good. Very good! But it's seriously difficult to shoot without any support, especially on crop format. So I had to use fully open aperture and even then had to raise ISO up to about 400 to get sharp photos. And that was in broad daylight. Next time definitely bring a tripod or at least monopod for support. And maybe a flash, DOF is so thin it almost doesn't exist at f/4. And 1:1 magnification with the adapter is almost too much for quick snaps. For this test I was shooting mostly between the 1:1.7 and 1:1.3 marks.

The lens itself:

NEX6_0003_5264 by Miran Amon, on Flickr

Test photos, all shot on NEX-6, converted from raw, a few are slightly cropped for composition:

1.
NEX6_0003_9128 by Miran Amon, on Flickr

2.
NEX6_0003_9129 by Miran Amon, on Flickr

3.
NEX6_0003_9130 by Miran Amon, on Flickr

4.
NEX6_0003_9162 by Miran Amon, on Flickr

5.
NEX6_0003_9168 by Miran Amon, on Flickr

6.
NEX6_0003_9208 by Miran Amon, on Flickr

The whole flickr album: https://flic.kr/s/aHskQh5r7p

[jamaeolus]

Great stuff. That mantis is awesome!

[Lloydy]

Great pictures, and I agree with jamaeolus - that mantis picture is superb.

My Rokkor 100 Macro is the big heavy f3.5 version, and I love it. It's a lens I can trust, if that makes sense. It does exactly what it's designed to do.

[miran]

Thanks. These mantises are b*tches. They will just not stay still to have their picture taken. As you try to find a good angle they will slowly turn away from you showing you their back. They don't scare as easily as most other critters and they don't fly away at the first movement but they do actively try to face away from you. But then every now and then they will look back over their shoulder to see what that strange man is doing. That's when you press click.