Close-up insect photography on our day off

I’ve been testing out my new lens recently- the Sony Zeiss close-focus 40mm f2 lens. This is an absolutely incredible piece of glass, and is best suited for close-up work, and even though it has some serious autofocus performance, I find this lens best suited to manual focus.

This is the same lens that I used in the following video production for Leonards at 39:

For some of these shots I set my Sony A7III to burst-mode using a very fast 300mbps memory card, shooting raw uncompressed images.

For the camera settings I chose 1/8000 shutter speed, F4 with an iso of 2500. Using the best sunlight I could get, I was able to capture insects like Bees and Dragonflies within a few inches from my lens, with absolutely no motion blur from their wings.

Why not use a macro lens? Well the Zeiss CF 40mm has far better colour and a superior light transmission than a regular macro lens, and I will be attempting to use extension tubes tomorrow to get even closer to my subjects flying in the air! Again, this kind of photography is far too fast for autofocus of any kind, so setting the lens to manual and letting the burst-mode capture quantities of images will increase my chances of getting an in-focus shot of an insect in mid-air.
More on this subject in a few days!

The following images are copyright protected and are not to be used without permission by myself.