Dust bunnies at macro level

Macro shot of my hair.

Talk about dirty!  This morning while I was combing my hair, I picked out one strand of hair from my comb.  It was interesting looking because the tip of the hair was white (yeah, I have gray hair since I was 24) and the base of the hair was black!  This was a second time I saw one of these hair strands like that.  Am I getting younger???

In any case, it was interesting enough I had to take a shot of it to document the anomalous growth.  I decided to use the Nikkor 105mm lens.  I thought it could do 1:1 reproduction but for some reason I could not get really close to the hair so I added an extension tube.

What came out was a little surprising.  Yes, I got my shot to demonstrate the weird change in colour but I also got a ton of dust dunnies in the photo!  All those really dark spots in the photo are dust bunnies!  They do appear at f/32 on my 18-200mm lens but they are a lot more apparent at the macro level.  Holy molly, I initially thought they were black spots on the paper that the hair was taped on but no, those were on my sensor!  Ok, time to do another wet cleaning.

Why do I get so much dust inside my camera???

105mm macro

It's rare that I see a bug in my house in the middle of winter but every now and then, a tiny, bitsy household spider will creep up out from the dark hideout it lives in.  This one spider was crawling in my bathroom the other day.  I was about to leave for work but had to take a few minutes to make use of my 105mm f/2.8 AFD lens.  I was lucky enough it was already mounted on my D90.

Here, I shot it at f/32, ISO1600, with bounce flash.

Macro with a Nikkor 105mm AF-D

I decided to bite the bullet and invested in a second hand Nikkor 105mm AF-D lens -- not the VR version. I shot some tests and it looks much more promising than my 50mm + extension tube system. What I was looking were the following:

• Depth of field: the 50mm system gave me only about 2mm to work with. There was no way I could not capture the whole body of a bee with it. The Nikkor 105mm gives you something somewhere between 1.5mm (at maximum aperture) 10mm (at f/16) to 25+mm (at f/57 at 1:1 macro). This greater DOF will be extremely useful when shooting without (and also with) a tripod.
• At minimum aperture, the picture in the viewfinder through the 50mm system is completely dark so it is nearly impossible to focus on the subject. It helps in bright daylight but light is not always available. With the 105mm lens, the aperture stays wide open until you release the shutter. This way, you can easily focus on the subject.

Some issues I found:

• Not that I did not know, but things become quite jittery at macro level. Without a tripod it is hard to obtain a sharp picture unless there is a strong source of light.
• The Auto Focus system is a bit hard to use. I use this lens with my D300 and I was trying to shoot a ruler at a 45 degree angle to gauge the DOF. The AF has no problem with hunting for a focus point 40cm away but was having some problems at really close distance. I'd be better off using manual focus in this case.

Well, I took some shots of a house fly on a flower (weird uh?) yesterday. I was quite happy with the result. I used the built-in flash for these shots (image contrast adjusted and image sharpened a tad bit in Irfanview):