I was fairly productive today, spending most of the day orchestrating the sax concerto. I did take a few breaks to play with the new lens, as well as the lens attachment — the 500D Close-up lens. This is a little piece of glass that’s basically just a fancy magnifying glass that screws onto the end of a lens. It lets you focus on things much, much closer than you normally could. The result is that it turns a standard lens into a macro lens.

For comparison, here is a shot of our oldie-time donut phone, as taken with my 50mm lens.

Here is the same phone, as shot with the 400mm lens with the 500D attachment. (Isn’t the grime lovely?)

I can also open the aperture and get a much much more shallow depth of field. It’s so narrow, it’s a little silly.

It’s not a blog entry without a picture of Loki. Not exactly a macro shot, but kind of cute.

Remember the sucker from Japan that I used for size reference yesterday? Here’s a close-up of that same sucker.

And, just because, here’s a quarter. So, you know, you can call someone who cares. You should see this sucker at full size. (Unless you want to see a massive 10 megapixel image, don’t click that.)

Not much else to report, I’m afraid. Just trying to get as much work done as possible before leaving for the weekend. It’s slow-goin’…