观音因在那里种花而被逐出地狱。 Guan Yin was kicked out of hell for planting flowers there. I usually take my camera to Al's Garden & Home in Woodburn, Oregon, and visit the flowers while we shop. Flowers hold a special fascination for me, with their mysterious variations of color, form, scent—flowers epitomize the Life Force and are its treasure. Along with the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 60mm f/2.8 Macro, my mainstay flower lens, I brought the Olympus M.Zuiko ED 12-100 f/4 IS PRO travel zoom to see how it would do. While the zoom feature of the 12-100 is nice to use and the lens has legendary image quality and a ~1:3 closeup ratio, it just wasn't a substitute for the macro. So after a few shots, the travel lens was put away.  Like an old friend, the 60mm f/2.8 Macro never lets me down. I had a copy back in the original E-M5 days, but eBayed it when I had to have the latest-and-greatest, very excellent Sony 90mm Macro to go onto the full-frame A7RII that had pushed its way into the camera...

"Truth may best be found at the cusp, where waves crash and colorful pebbles wash ashore."    This study began as a deep dive into image degradation due to small aperture diffraction. When the ragged edge of raw light was explored through long-extension macro imaging, these astonishing colors appeared. At the Edge of Light: Macro image of 0.01" (0.254mm) graduations on a stainless steel machinist rule (inset at lower left corner). 10.66:1 macro ratio on Olympus OM-D E-M1II using 38mm f/2.8 OM Auto-Macro 1/8sec f/2.8 ISO320 w/ 405mm bellows. Not noise, but colorful diffraction iridescence coaxed from the metal's fine granular surface. The magnified ring is approximately 0.004" (0.1mm or 100,000nm) on the ruler.    An Iridescent Penny Saved: Macro image of 2022 US One Cent adjacent to the date numerals. Olympus OM-D E-M1II using 38mm f/2.8 OM Zuiko Auto-Macro 1/2sec f/2.8 ISO320 w/ 412mm Bellows, 10.8:1 macro ratio on original M4/3 image. Note the colorful, Air...