Zeiss 50mm f/2 Makro Classic Lens Sample Pictures

When shooting for the web or for print, it is hard to beat the versatility of a white background. And a white background is not hard to create. A sheet of paper or any other white-colored material can be used. Simply align the subject with that background and hit the white background with enough light to make it white or near-white in your final exposure. If not pure white, make it so in Photoshop.
 
Lighting for the tulip itself is from a softbox. I love softboxes for macro photography.

After waiting out a rain storm in the parking lot, I was greeted with this fall view of Canyon Vista in Worlds End State Park. I worked with the 50mm compositions available to me and took home may variations with fast-changing clouds making even similar compositions quite different from each other. After struggling to determine which was my favorite, I decided to combine two images to make this one. Problem solved.

An infinite number of compositions seem to be available in a large sunflower field, but one that works well involves a primary sunflower subject in sharp focus with the remainder of the field blurred behind it. And the Zeiss 50mm f/2 Macro lens at f/2 gets this job done very nicely.

Wild mustard in full bloom creates a beautiful field of yellow.
 
When you see "Macro" (or "Makro" in this case) in the lens name, think of the term as an extension of a lens' capabilities – not a limitation of them. Most macro lenses make great landscape lenses and the Zeiss 50 f/2 Makro is one such lens.

The leaves are from a burning bush. Finding good leaf specimens is a challenging task. I hand-selected these and brought them into my studio. If you are familiar with burning bush leaves, you know that they have a strong curl – which makes them very difficult to layer. An overnight book-pressing resolved this problem, but the blemishes remained. Even the most-perfect leaves usually have some imperfections. Spraying the leaves with soft-box-reflecting water drops hides many of these imperfections and the Photoshop clone stamp tool handled the removal of the few remaining spots.

Sunflowers are great solo subjects, but always be looking for ways to take your images to the next level. Something as simple as a little honey bee adds interest to the composition.

A bed of imperfection-lacking red maple tree leaves is practically unfindable in nature. But, hand-selected leaves brought into a studio environment creates a different story. This image was lit by a single, overhead Canon 600EX-RT Speedlite in a Chimera XXS Softbox and triggered by a Canon ST-E3-RT Speedlite RF Transmitter. Triggering a softbox-mounted flash using RF instead of light eliminates the line-of-site issue sometimes created by the softbox.

Dune grasses blow in the seemingly-ever-present oceanside winds. By using a low-to-the-sand perspective along with a circular polarizer filter, the grasses and their plumes get a deep blue background.

When you start with a near-frame-filling subject as beautiful as a tulip, it is hard to take an ugly picture. This image was primarily backlit, creating some petal-shadowing.

For a different look at your Christmas tree, try a blur. Simply use manual focus to select a variety of out of focus states and throw in some aperture variations as well.

Want to draw your viewer's eyes to a particular location in the frame? Use a wide aperture at a close focus distance. The foreground and background blur act as arrows to present your subject as the primary attraction in the frame. Having strong contrast on the primary subjects and its background also attracts a viewer's eye.

That is a LOT of sunflowers. With an f/2.8 aperture in use, the background of an even moderately-long focus distance 50mm image becomes pleasantly blurred.
 
A Werner stepladder is one of my most-important sunflower field photography accessories. These flowers are very tall and human support is required to get above them.