Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L IS USM Macro Lens Sample Pictures

This naturally-lit fall crocus was captured handheld. For macro shots, a narrow aperture is needed to keep a significant portion of the subject in focus.

I was shooting this Helleborus flower in my studio when the spider climbed out of its hiding spot and raced across the leaf. I immediately went into action-photography mode and timed the shutter to include the spider in a balanced composition.

The Polyphemus Moth is very beautiful - especially when they are just out of their cocoon. This Polyphemus Moth has not taken its first flight yet, and with perfect wings, required almost no post processing. Light is from a setting sun.
 
This shot made great use of the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 L IS USM Lens' image stabilization. IS helped me frame the shot precisely, tightly and kept the shot sharp at 1/50 sec. The camera position is such that the entire length of wings falls into the plane of sharp focus.

This fall-colored leaf is covered in hoar frost. The frost creates a sharp contrast with the dark red leaf and the very dark background.
 
An f/2.8 aperture yields a very thin DOF at this short focus distance. Careful alignment of the leaf is necessary to keep an adequate portion of the subject in focus. The benefits of the narrow aperture are a faster shutter speed (it was extremely windy at the time of this shot) and a completely-blurred background.
 
This shot was taken handheld at 1/25 and near 1:1 / 1x magnification thanks to IS.

Creating a soft, even light on a close subject such as this one is a challenge that is often best-met by a small softbox positioned just outside of the frame. Creating this light with an on-camera Speedlite is a challenge that is perhaps best-met with a Rogue FlashBender Softbox.
 
For this photo, a Canon 600EX-RT was mounted with its head in the forward position. In this position, the attached FlashBender Softbox protruded out over the end of the lens to provide a broad overhead light on the flower, creating nice soft lighting without harsh shadows.
 
From a compositional standpoint, I positioned the flower so that the lines of the petals would radiate into the picture from a point about 1/3 of the way into the frame from both the bottom and right. The purple color borders/frames the cream/white color.

A small but strong storm moves off the coast of Acadia National Park / Mt Dessert Island, Maine, USA producing a rainbow for all to see.

Few natural subjects surpass flowers and butterflies in colorfulness. Planting flowers that attract butterflies takes advantage of both and planting them in your yard means fast access to these great subjects.
 
Don't have a garden of your own? Don't want to do the work? Others love gardening. Find someone who has this passion and share your photography passion with them in the form of images and prints. Alternatively, find a public garden.
 
Coneflowers are one of my favorite flowers and a small garden of them behind the house provided hours of distraction (I mean "gear evaluation") for me this summer. The shape of the flower permits full view of the butterfly and the working area keeps the butterfly busy long enough to get the photo. Because these flowers are planted on a bank, I can shoot horizontally across the flower tops (to get blurred blooms in the background) without lying on the ground. A raised planting box offers a similar advantage.
 
Most macro lenses work well for flowers, but butterflies are sometimes not comfortable with a lens close to them. Longer focal lengths permit longer working distances. In this case, the spangled fritillary butterfly was quite tolerant of my presence and I was able to utilize the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L IS Macro Lens at a close distance.
 
I'm still struggling to retrain my brain to frame slightly wider with the extreme resolution of the Canon EOS 5Ds R available, allowing minor cropping to achieve perfect framing during post processing. The result in this case was that the butterfly's antenna was slightly closer to the right edge of the frame than I wanted. Fortunately, I had taken multiple photos and was able to add a small strip to the right side of this image, with ideal wing position, from one of the others for a 52.9 megapixel final image size.
 
I used a Canon Macro Ring Lite MR-14EX II Flash with a camera exposure that balanced the ambient background lighting. Because the coneflower petals were closer to the flash than the butterfly, they were slightly brighter than I wanted. I decreased the brightness of the RAW file and overlaid the darker flower petals on the brighter butterfly and background.
 
What is in your flower bed? If the ideal flowers are not there, add them! Then get ready for your summer color.

I was shooting this Chrysanthemum early one morning. It was just wet enough that I wasn't completely satisfied with the results. So, using a small, empty eyeglass cleaner spray bottle, I applied a light mist of water to the mum until the image results were more exciting. This shot was taken handheld.

This particular Eagle Lake is in Acadia National Park, Maine. The sun shines on the brilliantly-colored fall foliage while the calm lake reflects its brilliance.
 
Macro lenses usually work very well for non-macro purposes.

Ripe berries await the flock of Cedar Waxed Wings that move from area to area harvesting the crop. Notice the S-curve flow the leaf, berries and branch form in the picture.

Sumac trees are one of the most-reliable fall-foliage performers in the area. They rarely disappoint. Isolate a leaf or small group of leaves against a pleasing background for a picture that also will not disappoint.

My primary interest in photographing this Botanical Tulip was to capture the incredible colors. This composition adds part of the finely-patterned stem to the frame.

Well, more like crawling over each other. These starfish are in a shallow tidal pool on the Maine coast. Macro lenses are fun to explore with.

The green leaves complement both the color and the shape of this luna moth.
 
The secret for the ultimate butterfly and moth pictures is to raise your own subjects. When they emerge from the chrysalis/cacoon, their wing are perfect (no tatters) and they are happy to rest for long periods of time. I am blessed with a daughter who has a passion for raising my subjects. This shot was taken in my studio using a large planter and studio lighting.

The soft lighting for this flower petal picture came from a large softbox. Manual focusing was used for this handheld (with IS) shot.

A white and yellow Chrysanthemum shows various stages of bloom in this photo. This shot was taken handheld in available light.

Finding wild butterflies and moths without tattered wings is a big challenge. The best answer to this challenge is to raise your own subjects. Or better yet, get one of the kids to do it for you.
 
This moth was photographed in-studio and released to the wild soon after it was able to fly. No editing was needed for those delicate wings.

Water droplets misted on a mum.

Hoar frost coats this low growing mountaintop plant. This approximately 1:1 / 1x magnification macro photo was shot handheld.

This is a near-to 1x magnification photo of an orange Zinnia flower in the early morning sunlight.

For this Helleborus flower composition, I created a curve through much of the frame using the of the stem and leaf combined. The flower is balanced on top of the green.

Capturing good butterfly pictures can be challenging. Perhaps the biggest two challenges to butterfly photography are constant, significant subject motion and tattered wings.
 
Butterflies are seldom still and often have a mild fear of humans. Add a little wind to their lightweight, wing-dominated bodies and even a stationary butterfly has motion.
 
Tattered wings are often best overcome by finding a new subject. It is hard to get a great butterfly picture without a near perfect wings and butterfly wings seem to deteriorate rapidly in their short lives. Even good quality subjects can require significant post processing to make wing repairs.
 
Raise your own subjects and these two challenges are erased. Well, erased for a short period of time at least. The kids have taken such an interest in monarch butterflies that we now have milkweed (the monarch caterpillar's food source) growing amongst a section of our house landscape. I'm not sure what others think about these "weeds" in our landscape, but ... the girls collected some monarch eggs this summer and raised them indoors, out of the reach of predators. Last week, the monarch metamorphosis moved from the chrysalis stage to the butterfly stage.
 
A bit of warning is given before the butterflies hatch – the color of the chrysalis turns from bright green to transparent, showing the dark butterfly tightly packaged inside. But, it takes a watchful eye to see the chrysalis open as this event occurs very quickly. Once open, the monarch pumps its wings up rather quickly and then appears to remain the same – and motionless – for a long enough period of time to capture many photos.
 
I was ready for this particular hatching. I had the milkweed leaf holding the chrysalis in a Delta Grip-It Clamp that was sitting on the kitchen island. A moderate distance behind the main subject was a cardboard box with a sheet of printer paper taped onto it.
 
A Canon Macro Ring Lite MR-14EX II Flash was mounted to a Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 L IS USM Macro Lens and the lens was mounted to a Canon EOS 5D Mark III DSLR. A Canon Speedlite 600EX-RT Flash was in its shoe stand and configured as an optical remote slave to the ring flash.
 
The perfect-condition butterfly hatched and hung motionless from its chrysalis while I went into action.
 
The lighting I used for the butterfly image series I captured on this day, and a great technique for lighting in general, was separated by layer. The ring lite was providing the main subject layer lighting and the slave 600EX-RT took care of the background light with brightness levels individually controlled from the ring lite. With a white background and a set of Rogue Flash Gels, I was able to create a large variety of background colors for the images, but this particular shot's background was simply a green notebook. A variation I incorporated into some images, to create a less-even background color, was to use a coarsely crinkled sheet of aluminum foil as a reflector beside the printer paper.
 
After nearly two hours of posing, the butterfly became active and was released outdoors. After the forth butterfly hatched in as many days, I had enough willpower to just observe the process without a camera.

Looking down into a fall crocus flower under the soft lighting of a cloudy sky.

Shooting flowers almost feels like cheating. They are so beautiful that if you get the shot basics (lighting, composition, exposure and focus) right, the photo is always great. When shooting smooth colors at narrow apertures, sensor dust becomes very noticeable. Clean your sensor before shooting - and/or clone out the spots during post processing.
 
AI Servo focus mode and IS were used for this handheld shot. Lighting is from one studio strobe in a large softbox.

Dry grasses on top of Cadillac Mountain hold the night's hoar frost.

When photographing this close to a subject, it becomes difficult to get light past the lens. The Canon MR-14EX Macro Ring Light makes this task simple. The feather is evenly lit and, with the quick burst of flash providing all of the light, very sharp even though shot with a narrow aperture under dim lighting.

Nature provides great patterns for photographing. The orange background is a Nasturtium flower.

The Christmas cactus that spends most of the year looking rather mundane, essentially green foliage in a pot, finally opened a single bloom. These blooms last only a couple of days, they are irresistibly-beautiful, and I decided that testing the Canon EOS RP's focus stacking feature was a good excuse to photograph this one.

The details of this image, including 100% crops, are now included on the Canon Focus Bracketing page.

Basically, the RP and DPP make creating a high-quality focus stacked image really simple.

... I would be dead. This American Toad appears that it might be fly hunting. Don't be afraid to move in close to your subjects - to gain a different perspective/look in your images. Macro lenses make moving closer very possible - as long as your subject doesn't hop away.

Sumac Tree leaves in their reliable full fall color hang in the late day sun. A direct side-on camera position allows the subject leaves to remain in good focus while the background is strongly blurred due to the telephoto focal length and wide aperture.

Macro lenses are among the most-fun lenses available and the Canon Macro Ring Lite MR-14EX II Flash makes getting great images with these lenses very easy.
 
The poppy is an especially big challenge to light from a top-down orientation. There are very few good methods to get light around the end of a macro lens without creating unwanted shadows deep inside this flower. The macro ring lite, with a pair of circular flash tubes positioned at the end of the lens, wraps a light around the flower's significantly-raised pistil while avoiding shadows created by the also-significantly-raised petals.
 
This result is what I was looking for. The lighting is somewhat flat, but there is plenty of color and detail in the poppy to keep me satisfied. This was a very easy picture to capture with the ring lite mounted.

By placing the camera's line of sight perpendicular to the plane of the plant leaf, much of the leaf remains in focus even with the shallow DOF producted by the f/2.8 aperture at this close distance. The more distant leaves obviously go out of focus. The primary leaf is fully contained in the frame, but the background leaves go beyond the frame into the corners.

A hoar frosted landscape found a the top of Cadillac Mountain, Acadia National Park, Maine.

Open the macro lens aperture wide and move in close. DOF will become very shallow. Use this fact to your artistic advantage.

A yellow-leaf-clad tree growing horizontally curves through the photo while the rock provides a base for the frame. Acadia National Park is full of not-well-known photo opportunities such as this.

This is a wild baby cottontail rabbit photographed in the studio using a Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L IS USM Macro Lens. Yes, there are some inconsistencies in that statement. The 100mm macro is not a first choice for a serious photographer photographing wild rabbits and ... why is the wild rabbit in the studio? Let me explain.
 
First, apparently the dog couldn't help itself and had to show us a baby cottontail rabbit (called a "kit") from a nest it found. Golden retrievers have soft mouths and she gently delivered the rabbit to the front door unharmed. The baby rabbit was so cute that a few photos were a requirement.
 
To create a natural scene, I took a decorative piece of driftwood and placed it on the shooting table along with a couple of ferns sacrificed from the flower bed just outside. With control over many aspects of the image, the 100mm macro lens was the ideal choice in this case. The 100 L is one of my MFU (Most-Frequently-Used) around-the-house lenses because of its versatility (great image quality, relatively small size with a light weight, image stabilization, 1:1/1x magnification ability, ...). It seems that there is always a subject available for this lens.
 
A large softbox and studio monolight is always beside my shooting table, ready to light whatever small or medium-sized subject that shows up. From lenses to backpacks to ... baby rabbits. A light source significantly larger than a close subject creates a soft light, lacking hard shadows. In this case, the light was a bit too soft for my taste, making the scene appear somewhat unnatural. Adding a few exposure adjustment layers with creatively painted layer masks (in Photoshop) created a more-natural unevenness (digital flagging) to the lighting. Of course, an octagonal catchlight in the eye is not going to say "sun" to anyone.
 
The rabbit (mostly) cooperated and after capturing a few photos, the kids asked Sierra (the dog) to find the nest. I thought that request was unrealistic and that the rabbit was orphaned, but ... Sierra took the girls to the middle of a nearby field of thick grass and impressively used its nose to point out the covered nest. The rabbit was reunited with its siblings with ... an unbelievable story to share.

A closeup shot of pink flower petals.

To get this shot, I hauled a large tree stump into my studio. With the ability to use my full studio lighting and with a natural surface for the moth, I had an easy combination for good photos.
 
The shallow depth of field at such a close focusing distance means that moth and butterfly photos often work best with the wings aligning with the camera's sensor plane.

Using a narrow aperture at a short macro focus distance will leave much of the image out of focus. Sometimes this is desirable.

A setting sun, as usual, creates a great warm light. The close focusing distance, wide aperture and full frame sensor create a diffusely-blurred background. The little bug provides a small amount of entertainment and a point of focus on the beautiful Daffodil.

Weeping cherry trees are incredibly beautiful when in full bloom. However, I don't find it easy to create a compelling image from this subject. By getting under the tree and shooting upward (and timing my shots with the light wind) from a close distance with a wide aperture, I had a take-home that worked for me.

Raised from a caterpillar, this large Imperial Moth has just emerged from its cacoon - and is quite happy to pose for its in-studio portrait.

Some subjects beg to centered in the frame and one of the first of such subjects that come to my mind are products. Products are often rendered large in the frame, showing as much detail as possible in the space allocated for them on a web page, product catalog, etc. Today's product is a smart phone – an iPhone 5 to be specific.
 
I first shared this iPhone photo in the Canon Macro Ring Lite MR-14EX II Flash review and obviously, the ring flash is the source of the bright reflection. Ring lite flash reflections in my photos is not usually my preference, it probably does not help sell the product in this case and I typically avoid these, but ... sometimes creatively using the open and close parenthesis reflection can work for at least an artistically creative purpose.
 
This phone and the glass under it is on are both black and highly reflective. To avoid other reflections on the phone and glass, I had a piece of black velour material between me and the subject and the ambient lights were turned off to create a black room. To get the flash reflection perfectly centered, I utilized the reflection of the MR-14EX's focusing lights while working straight overhead.
 
Working in the dark with only the focusing lights made perfectly aligning and centering the subject with the camera perfectly positioned over the phone a big challenge. I'll just say that more than 1 photo was required to get it right. I might have very slightly tweaked the image borders in Photoshop also – when the borders of an image are solid white or black in color, it is easy to manipulate the image boundaries.
 
The overall result in this case is an image that you probably have not seen before (other than in the aforementioned review).

People seem to enjoy being creeped out around this time of the year (Halloween) and spiders are a perennial favorite source of creepiness. They happen to be my wife's biggest fear at any time of the year, so when I brought a mother dark fishing spider carrying a big "cluster" of babies into the house for a photo op (it was dark outside), she was not too happy. And when the spider jumped off of my white paper background and lost her cluster, I went back outside (after corralling what seemed like hundreds of tiny baby spiders).
 
I wasn't looking to create an award-winning photo of this spider, but wanted decent quality without much time investment. I mounted a Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L IS USM Macro Lens to a Canon EOS 5Ds R and attached a Canon Macro Ring Lite MR-14EX II Flash. The scene was dark (even inside) and the lens shaded the subject at this distance, so I utilized the MR-14EX's focus assist lights to manually focus on the mother's eyes (all 8 of them) with the plane of sharp focus angled to include many of the babies.
 
As mentioned, I went high-tech with the background: a sheet of white printer paper goes with everything. With the main subject being medium-dark colored, I was able to boost the highlights slightly in post, creating a pure white background, without negatively impacting the mid and dark tones.
 
Spiders are a popular fall theme and that is probably the only time of the year when you can post a spider picture that gets socially shared. Find out who has arachnophobia. Dig out one of your spider pics or better yet, go create a new one. Share it and peg the creep-out meter.

After spending over a decade trying to establish milkweed plants on our property (what monarch caterpillars eat), healthy plants finally emerged a couple of years ago – in the flower beds next to our house, not close to where we were trying to grow them. While most "weeds" are not welcome in the flower beds, we embraced what we got and allowed them to prosper in place.

This year, milkweed plants started growing randomly throughout the yard, though frequent lawn mowing kept their visibility near nothing. After an especially long period of rain, the yard crop started showing leaves and my observant daughter spotted a monarch laying eggs on them. Prior to the next lawn cutting, she and my wife removed over 40 eggs from the rogue plants.

Most of the eggs were transferred to the being-tolerated flower bed plants and several were raised indoors, which produces perfect specimens for photographic purposes. The ideal time to photograph butterflies is just after they emerge as their wings are in perfect condition and they remain mostly still for a couple of hours. Knowing when that time is coming involves observing the monarch chrysalis color. Newly-formed chrysalises are bright green in color, but they turn very dark just prior to emergence of the butterfly stage.

I saw this opportunity coming and had some gear ready. When your camera is an EOS model with a hot shoe, the set of lighting accessories available, both Canon brand and third party options, is vast. For this image, I used a Canon Macro Ring Lite MR-14EX II Flash for a very even light on the subject. With the dual MR-14EX flash tubes configured for equal power, this flash creates a flat light, often void of shadows. When the subject is as vibrantly-colored as this one, flat lighting works quite well.

The background is a piece of orange paper (I tried a variety of colors) being held with a Delta 1 Grip-It Single Arm with 1" Clamp (extremely useful accessory) and lit with a remotely-controlled Canon Speedlite 600EX-RT Flash. Alternatively, I could have used a white paper and gelled the flash to create the desired color.

The background light being positioned behind the foreground light meant that it did not influence the lighting on the subject and the background being far enough behind the foreground meant that the foreground light did not influence the background brightness.

While I didn't expect the Canon EOS R to have any trouble with Canon's Speedlite system (other EOS models don't), it is always nice to have reassurance, especially for a new camera line. Or, maybe this test was just the excuse I needed to spend a couple of hours photographing the monarch.

At macro focus distances, depth of field becomes very shallow. One of the keys to capturing this image was to align the camera so that the wing was perfectly parallel to the imaging sensor, perpendicular to the center of the lens' image circle. Still, f/16 was needed to obtain the depth of field necessary to keep almost the entire butterfly sharp.

This is a newly-hatched IO Moth resting on a cedar tree trunk.
 
When photographing butterflies and moths at close distances, it is diffucult to keep their entire wing surfaces sharp. A narrow aperture and careful parallel sensor and wing alignment is key to this. Because this moth is somewhat rounded, I was still not able to keep the wing tips sharp at this focus distance even with an f/10.0 aperture.
 
Lighting is from direct late-day sunlight.