Sometimes a plain, central composition works too, just make sure you can balance the peripheral objects, here the flower in the top left bugged me so I had to use a brutal vignette to suppress it a little. Oh yeah, the lens. It’s nice for what I call macro but what isn’t actually macro. It focuses…

To avoid always having to stick to a central composition just take the photo with the subject dead-center, and crop it to adhere to either the rule of 3rds or just balance it with something in the background. Here I was going for a Fibonacci spiral composition.

Here’s that convex focus plane I was talking about. That’s what makes the edges look spherical. Works well for symmetrical compositions, not necessarily fully central but you can see that the flower is losing sharpness towards the top. This is one of the limitations of the lens unfortunately.

Purple Haze… This is not a steamy bathroom, I wiped the lens with some alcohol swabs to clean it – it’s just old and grimy. This photo doesn’t really show the potential but it’s just a reference, so I can compare the lenses.

This is the last lens I’ll be showing on this exact bedside table as I moved out shortly after this series and I’m not even remotely attached to the pine quality of probably ikea. I’ll still use the DIYcam for testing, just for consistency, and I do have the lamp, cup, tin and CD stack…

Nice depth of field here, the lens is set at 6.3 but with enough space from the background, you can get separation like this.

I think this was shot at 1/60, and took a few attempts due to wind, at ISO 800. Still good enough image, light was nice, nothing special but it takes reasonable photos and that’s neat.

All of these samples were from about 15 mins around my garden as this thing is actually embarrassing to take out of my house. Here’s a crow, it’s pretty sharp – editing of these photos is done within reason, I don’t sharpen them, I don’t correct vignetting or distortion. Just some contrast/lightness corrections.