Wildlife & macro photography

I photograph the things everyone walks past.

Bees, beetles, hoverflies, ladybirds, the occasional woodpecker. Almost all of it shot in a 130-year-old Victorian garden in Elsecar, mostly before eight in the morning, mostly on my knees in wet grass.

Free lock screens

People keep asking what I shoot with

So here it is every body, lens, flash and bit of homemade-looking diffuser, with no gatekeeping and no affiliate links.

Fair warning though: the kit is the least interesting part. I've seen better macro shot on a ten-year-old body by someone willing to lie in a flowerbed for forty minutes. Buy the cheapest thing that gets you close and spend the rest of the money on time.

What I'm using right now

Currently shooting almost everything on the Laowa 90mm. Two-to-one magnification and fully manual, which means more misses but the ones that land go closer than I've ever been able to get.

Lens Laowa 90mm f/2.8 2x Ultra Macro APO Currently shooting almost everything on the Laowa 90mm. Two-to-one magnification, fully manual, and it goes closer than I've ever been able to get. The manual part is the bit people flinch at, and it's the bit I actually prefer. At this magnification autofocus feels like a fight, it hunts, latches onto a leaf behind the subject, and by the time it's decided the bee has moved on. Manual focus takes that argument away. I set the magnification I want, then move myself rather than the lens. The R6's MF Focus Guide does a lot of the heavy lifting. It shows which direction to turn and when you've hit it, so instead of squinting at the back of the camera hoping, you get a clear signal. Worth turning on if you've got it and haven't tried it, it's buried in the menus and most people never find it.

The macro setup

Handheld, always. Flash on top, diffuser over it, working distance of a few centimetres and a lot of very slow breathing. Almost everything sits around f/8, 1/200, ISO 400, the flash is doing the work, not the shutter.

Body Canon EOS R6 MKii I upgraded to the R6 Mark II specifically for pre-shooting, and it's the only feature I've ever bought a body for. RAW Burst Mode holds about half a second of frames before you press the shutter properly. So when a bird takes off and it always goes before your brain has registered it, those frames already exist. You're no longer reacting fast enough, you're just recording that something happened and letting the camera hand you back the moment you missed. It's changed what's possible with takeoffs and feeding behaviour more than any lens has. The trade-off is file sizes that'll fill a card alarmingly quickly, and you do end up culling a lot.
Lens Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM
Flash Godox V1C
Diffuser CygnusTech

The bird setup

Body & Lens Canon EOS R6 MKii
Lens Canon 100-400mm L Series MKii

The only failure is never trying.

Eight lock screens, free

Macro shots from the garden, sized for your phone, checked against the clock so nothing important sits behind the time.

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