On many photo shoots I have been asked to capture not only the main subject of perhaps an object within a studio environment but also capture more detail as well. In commercial photography this is often asked and used when wanting to display photographs in the media, magazine areas of advertising or company web sites. Buyers want to see the overall impression but also want to view at close proximity the detail of the subject.
How often do you see a car advert showing the overall design but then showing close up views of the stitching on seats, trims and branding? Ever increasingly web sites that are clothing based wanting to promote mail order sales. All want to give the impression of quality and importance to the individual product.
Here I have within my arsenal of lenses two special little gems from Nikon being the Micro Nikkor series. I have both a 55mm and 105mm that are manual focus but serve the purpose extremely well. Both these, one obviously being of different focus length is able to focus on a subject at close distance. The art of using such a lens to do this is that you can focus on the important areas but using a wider aperture force the background to go out of focus so the detail that you are concentrating on is even more enhanced.
Apple Blossom
In this image I photographed blossom on an apple tree in the garden. The fine flowers would have been difficult to capture with some standard lenses. Or if you wanted to use only a proportion of a standard frame it would need to be enlarged to a degree to obtain a close up. Here the lens can fill the camera frame to capture all the quality of the image.