Some of my fist attempts at shooting with my new Canon MP-E65mm 1-5x macro lens. I can see that this lens is going to take a lot of practice. I have a new respect for the results that other photographers have achieved with this lens. There are some pictures of flowers that I took at the Denver Botanic Gardens. I had to find the *really* tiny flowers to shoot with this lens.

For those of you who are not familiar with the MP-E65mm, it is quite unlike other lenses. Not only does it NOT have auto focus, it has NO focus whatsoever. You focus by moving the lens physically closer to or further away from your subject. Also, because the focus point is typically 1 to 2 inches in front of the lens, lighting becomes a problem; the lens casts a shadow on the subject. So, for most of the shots I'm using a ring flash attached to the front of the lens. The ring flash also allows me to use a smaller aperture which gives me slightly more depth of field, otherwise, the depth of field is *extremely* shallow. A side effect of using the ring flash is that the background areas of the image are often black.