I got into photography because I wanted to do macro/close up photography, especially of flowers. When I started out it was hard work but backed up with plenty of enthusiasm back then I was able to pull it off, my earliest close up photos are still among my best so far.
Tiny pink flower (top left)
This was one of my earliest close-up images, taken in 2014. This unknown pink flower of a weed is very tiny and grew out of a crack in-between two slabs in my back garden. My camera set-up for this photo is the Olympus PEN E-PL2 mounted with my early macro lens (Minolta MD Rokkor 50mm f1.4 attached to the Vivitar 2x macro tele-converter) on a budget tripod.
My early macro camera lens set-up was very cumbersome but inexpensive. Both are manual legacy lenses bought cheaply from eBay. As I was starting out back then I did not want to buy expensive macro lens; I still don't.
White flower (top middle)
This photo is that of what I think is a white Grecian or winter windflower (Anemone blanda). This was taken in my son's school garden in early spring of 2015 while waiting for him to come out from his classroom. Instead of the cumbersome macro lens set-up I used in the first photo, I used a Fotga 10mm auto extension tube mounted on a Panasonic Lumix G 20/F1.7 II lens. The camera I used here is my Olympus OMD E-M10.
Flower stamens (top right)
This image is that of the stamens of what I think was a daffodil flower taken at the same time as the second photo above.
Orange daisy flower (bottom left)
This image of an orange daisy flower was taken after Sunday Mass in the church garden in late autumn of 2014. Using only an LG G2 smartphone, I edited the photo in the Android apps Pixlr Express (selective colouring) and Snapseed (basic edits). This photo was part of a small series of smartphone images I took that day as some sort of Sunday 'shutter therapy'.
Red flower (bottom middle)
This photo of an unknown red flower taken in early spring 2015 was part of a mini-series of images I took while trying out my newly bought legacy lens. The lens was a Minolta MD 35-70mm f3.5 macro zoom. Mounted on the Olympus OMD E-M10 camera, I set the macro zoom lens to macro mode (1:4) and at f5.6 I captured this particular image. I only did some sharpening in the Android app Snapseed. As you can see in the photo, the colours from the Minolta lens are quite vivid.
Red poppy flower (bottom right)
This tiny red poppy flower grew out wild in our back garden. This was back in summer 2013 and I used the same macro lens set-up that also captured the first photo above, but this time mounted on the Olympus PEN E-PL1 camera.
