And here’s to fine wine. This is another­one of the shots I had sub­mit­ted to the “More Than Words” photo com­pet­i­tion. This was one of the first pho­tos taken with my (at the time) new macro lens, a 100mm ƒ/2.8 lens, that I had just got­ten a few weeks earlier. It shows one of the more “res­id­ent” inter­na­tion­als stu­dents in Maynooth hav­ing a nice glas of white wine in the Caulfield’s pub.

Macro lenses clas­sic­ally come in sev­eral focal length, typ­ic­ally around 50mm, 100mm and 200mm. In par­tic­u­lar the 100mm ones are quite often used as por­trait lenses too as they can give quite flat­ter­ing per­spect­ives in terms of a just-​right amount of per­spect­ive com­pres­sion when tak­ing head-​shots or a bit fur­ther out. Here’s for instance a very nice por­trait of Barak Obama taken with a 105mm lens (thanks to the EXIF data left intact ;-)).

So if you hap­pen to own a macro lens of around 100mm, don’t just use it for mac­ros, give it a go with por­traits or other non-​macro-​y sub­jects too!