This weekend I went to an animal park with some friends and their kids and since this was more a family outing than a photo trip, I only took one lens with my: my Canon 70 – 300mm IS lens. This worked great for getting up close and personal with the animals and getting some great snapshots of the kids while they were playing on the playgrounds and running around having fun. The telephoto is absolutely ideal for such jobs because you can zoom in and out as you need. But given my love of macro phtography there was one area it is clearly lacking: near field focussing! The minimum distance is very long compared to a macro lens and there were some really beautiful leaves and mushrooms I wanted to highlight but getting close just wasn’t working.
I have to admit, it took me a moment to find a solution (I really haven’t been photographing enough this year…) but then it dawned on me: I had an incredible zoom with me – going further away and zooming in would work just as good, so that is what I did. It is not the same as getting very close with a macro lens but still I got some great nature shots.