This week, Susan at Musin’ With Susan has come up with what I think is an inspired idea for her weekly Macro Moments challenge. Under the heading ‘Broaden Your Scope’ she invites us to use our Macro lens for anything other than macro.

It’s a great idea because I suspect that I’m not the only one who feels that they don’t get enough use out of their macro lens, or at the very least ought to resort to it more often. I read somewhere that a macro lens can be very effective for portraits. However, the resolution means that it can also be quite – shall we say unforgiving – for this purpose.

Perhaps it’s not too surprising to discover that even non-macro images can indeed be noticeably sharper when taken through a macro lens (specialised and innately more expensive than a standard kit lens, decent enough though they can be). When I tried it out this afternoon, the quality difference and superior sharpness was quite obvious: analogous to the difference between just brushing your teeth and brushing, then rinsing with Listerine.

Anyway, here is a very small selection of Madame’s collection of model elephants:

Nikon D800 with Nikkor 105mm f2.8 Macro lens. 1/125 (flash) at f19, ISO 4000 (!)

And just to prove that this really wasn’t a close-up, here’s the uncropped, unedited original image: