Cross Posted from General.

Had a little free time today between shoots (photography) and stole some of my girlfriend's dad's equipment to play around with.

Equipment:

60mm Micro Nikkor f 2.8
D200
105mm Micro Nikkor f2.8 (this one was manual focus)
Brass balls for the bee shots

The working distance is literally inches, so in my eagerness to get some great pictures I used every bit sticking the lense right up into this bee nest. It was a nice rush as bees whizzed past my ears as I'm snapping shots wondering if the noise would disturb them.

ETA: Actually had one dive bomb my neck, luckily he failed in his mission. He flew away with his life and I left happy.

Well without further adieu:






Only cropped shot here, everything else is original, just resized using Microsoft resizer plugin for posting. As you can see once you get really close to subjects depth of field really becomes a problem, if the bees move fractions of millimeters closer or further from the lense they instantly lose sharpness.... this was a big problem.... but I got a few good ones.



Used a small aperture here to help with depth of field issues, as well as not shooting so close. Sharpness is great.  



Decent shot of this bumble bee, got carried away because they proved to bee pretty shy and missed chance for a nice composition but they were very eager to fly away and getting closer was very hard due to disturbing the bee while bumping the plant, so composition isn't that great.



Great shot of the veins of the bee's wing.



My girlfriend's stepmom was making fun of me for shooting bugs and being a smartass she showed me a bug to take a picture of.

ETA: You can really see the shallow depth of field, focus is over a very narrow range. Leads to some cool effects.



Flower shots, they're fun



Here's the original cat pic,



Great wallpaper I made using a sizeable crop. Feel free to steal it, let me know if anyone wants a larger one.