Let's get closer

If you have followed me for a while, you know I love to photograph cannabis. It is such a cool looking plant, especially during flower. But have you ever seen macro shots of seedlings? They can be pretty cool and really show off how the features of a freshly sprouted cannabis plant.

To get these shots, I used my Canon 5D Mark IV, with a Canon 100mm f/2.8 macro lens, extension tubes (to get even closer), and a tripod. I set my aperture to f/20, so that I can get as much of the plant in focus as I could.

If I had set the aperture to f/2.8 or so, only a small sliver of the plant would be in focus. The downside to being at f/20 is that I needed to have the shutter open for over a full second.

So with the shutter speed over a second, I needed to make sure that my tripod wasn't moving at all. Whenever you press the shutter button to take the picture, it will shake the camera, and this would ruin your shot, so I set my camera on a 10 second delay, so once I pressed the button, the camera had 10 seconds to become still before opening the shutter to capture the image.

The small hairs on the seedlings are pretty much invisible to the naked eye. So it is pretty cool to be able to take pictures like this and see these plants in such detail.

Nature is so amazing. I am hoping to get some better macro equipment so I can get even closer. I will need to get a remote shutter so that I don't have to touch my camera at all, because it was hard enough to keep things in focus as close as I was for these shots. Being even closer, any movement of the camera could push the entire shot out of focus.

Both of my seedlings have sprouted up out of the ground and are well on their way to getting big and strong. I have big hopes for these two plants and it will be cool watching them grow over the next few months. I am hoping to find more creative ways to share their growth.