Back Porch Gardening: Back Porch Gardening Upclose

If I haven't mentioned it already, I'm an avid photographer. My camera of choice is a Nikon D7000. I'm always taking pictures of my kids, plants, back porch, yard, pond and pretty much anything else I can.

I wanted to take some interesting shots of my garden and decided to use my 100mm macro Lens manufactured by Tokina. For those of you who are unaware, a macro lens (sometimes also referred to as micro) is used to take extreme close ups. In the case of this Tokina, it is capable of up to a 1:1 macro ratio meaning the size of the impression on the sensor (or film back in the day) is the same size as the subject is in real life. A good way to think about it would be that if you used a 1:1 macro lens on a film camera to shoot a penny then the image of the penny on the film negative would be identical to the penny in real life. The same idea applies with digital but it gets a bit fuzzy when you're talking 1s and 0s instead of an actual picture on a negative.

Anyway, a few of these shots will look familiar. Anyone with a macro has probably taken a close up of a petunia. I did that but also wanted to show an extreme close up view of some plants grown not for their aesthetics. Enjoy!