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Nothing to do, too warm in the city and no food in the fridge. A visit to my parents was sounding a good idea !
I already had purchased the canon MP-E 65 lens a few months ago (almost a year) but besides a small test to see it was functioning, it stayed in my camera bag. Because I knew my parents were away for another hour, I thought it was a good idea to test it out on some stuff in their garden. If you are not familiar with this lens, it’s a 65mm dedicated macrolens. A normal macro lens will project a subject life-size on a full frame sensor(35m). This lens can magnify the subject until 5 x life-size. But it has also a few downsides : no auto-focus, no image stabilisation, depth of field is measures in tenths of a millimeter(F16 with 5 times magnification, the depth of field is 0.05mm) and of course like all my other toys, quite expensive.

I tried it with a macro sliding rail and a special manfrotto head that I could move in really small steps but the wind was blowing way too hard to get a sharp picture. So after a while (and 100% of failures) I tried without the tripod. The result was a lot better but it remained really hard to get sharp focus. When you look through the camera, it’s really dark and completely out of focus until you’ll get to right distance between your lens and the subject (measured in a few centimeters). But before you realized that you got sharp focus you probably have moved again a tiny bit and it’s again out of focus. (or the insect is already on the next flower and you can start all over). At the same time I was holding my breath (less movement of my upper body) and was leaning over some flowers. So when I finally found the subject and got it in focus, I needed to breath and again could start of to get focus. Who said that taking photographs isn’t hard work ???

The main problem,  besides the incredible tiny amount of depth of field, is light. Because the lens is almost on the subject, you need a flash. I used an 580 ex II on a stand but I really could use a  Canon Macro Twin Lite MT-24EX Flash. But still, I’m quite happy with the result of my first proper test of the MP-E 65 lens.