Here are a couple of shots I took in the garden last weekend, havent touched my camera since Christmas and need to start playing again!

The one of the mouse is brilliant, especially like the post processing youve done with it.

Aye. The fact you managed to get a shot of one is as impressive as the photo itself

Really like the mouse one, the other is nice as well but i get a little drawn to the light area at the top right instead of drawn to the in focus area. Great work getting the focus sharp on the wasp (?) and the plant though.

What lens is that?

Looks more like a hover fly, or false bee, to me. Admittedly cant see that much detail, but bees and wasps (and ants) belong to the order Hymenoptera, which have the distinguishing feature of 2 sets of wings, compared to flies (Diptera), which have a single set of wings and usually a pair of "halters" which look like stubs.

Quote from: zpyderLooks more like a hover fly, or false bee, to me. Admittedly cant see that much detail, but bees and wasps (and ants) belong to the order Hymenoptera, which have the distinguishing feature of 2 sets of wings, compared to flies (Diptera), which have a single set of wings and usually a pair of "halters" which look like stubs.

Correct! (I think)

It was most definitely hovering, hence getting a good picture, made it easy to follow it round then give me time to re-focus before  it hovered somewhere else, got quite a few good pics, but liked this one the best...

For the mouse, I was in the garden and saw run over by the bin, then it saw me and shot behind, so gave me enough time to run in the house and grab the camera and waited a few minutes for it to come back out again..

For both I used my 70 - 300 (Non-IS) Canon Lens

Thanks for your comments guys much appreciated!

Mouse pic is really nice

Im supprised the depth of focus is so shallow on the 70-300, did you blur it in post processing or is the apature lower than i think?

Ive just got a 50mm 1.8 so im spending all my time playing with narrow DoF.

Settings were as below, no post processing on the blur at all, but the plants behind were actually quite far back.

The Lens is actually a EF75-300mm f/4-5.6 USM

Mouse pic was:

ISO 800 / 300mm f/5.6 1/200sec

The Hover fly pic was:

ISO 1600 205mm f/7.1 1/3200sec


The 50mm 1.8 is a great lens, really good for portrait and object shots, have one myself

EF75-300mm has a very shallow depth of field at 300mm if you are fairly close to the subject. I have the same lens.

50mm f/1.8 is also a good choice, especially on APS-C 1.6 multiplier sensor cameras, effectively it becomes an 80mm so ideal portrait lens.

Mouse photo is really nice.