91:365 At the museum - playing with a new lens

Anna: Philippe got himself a new macro lens today - I'll leave him to explain what he got - so we went to the museum again to test it out. I didn't take very many pictures myself this time, but I did get a few interesting ones.



Can you figure out what this is?

















Here's the whole thing. It's the result of a lightning strike following a copper wire into damp soil. The lightning boiled away the water and melted the soil into glass, leaving a bit of copper wire still visible at the end. Freaky!












I finally got a decent shot of my favorite egg in the birds gallery - taken from the rear of the display, so I wouldn't be blocking the spotlights. I just love the patterns on this egg!













Philippe was having problems with blogger, trying to upload his pictures, so I found a way to upload them differently. You can view the whole set here. He'll add his comments when he gets a chance to, later. :-)

Philippe: I got a 90mm 1:1 Tamron macro lens because they were absolutely *out* of the cheaper nikkor 60mm micro. This lens rocks :D

The lens is a bit of a pig, so I have to use either a tripod, high ISO or a flash... The cat did not appreciate my choice here ;)















*NO* clue what this bug is, but I liked the focus point.. Manual is almost mandatory with this lens as auto hunts for a while.















Synthetic Bismuth; again, with the manual focus set a little within the structure. I think I'll be kissing this lens goodnight for a while.






























Gypsum.. Pretty... monosyllabic...















This was one of my first tests of the lens.. "Don't... move.. the pencil....." :P