That means 59 minutes of lunch hour when I could have been eating, drinking, working, napping but was instead, roaming a garden with my FZ50 and Raynox in hand. The Raynox 250 is an easy, inexpensive, snap-on macro lens that keeps my FZ50 in continuous rotation. The FZ50 could otherwise be sitting idle in the shadow of my DSLR. So, I love the Raynox for its inherent value and also for its symbiotic relationship to my precious FZ50. The FZ is the camera on which I learned to photograph birds in flight, and through which I realized the power of digital in the natural world.
I call the Raynox my “Bug Lens” because it’s hard not to seek out bugs when you have a lens that renders hover flies into full-frame creepy crawlers. These days, I prefer the Raynox 150 to the 250. The 150 has a bigger sweet spot and is a bit more forgiving of movement. I shoot most of my Raynox photos handheld which is a challenge in natural conditions, and with a focal area the size of a pea — as it is on the 250. Still, this morning as I was rushing out, I couldn’t find my 150 so I grabbed the 250 and did my best to shoot between breezes, curbing the shakes of my caffeinated hand.
I don’t know why it never occurred to me to shoot video with the macro lens on, but I did that for the first time with the bug you’ll see below. I think this bug is a hoverfly, rooting through pollen. (I almost spelled that “Pollan” — Michael Pollan on the brain, I guess.)
Here’s the basic bug-foraging vid, and below that . . . my 59-minute gallery of Raynox shots:
