After nearly eighteen months in Thailand, we are escaping for a quick break until Saturday evening.

She who must be obeyed has not had a holiday since she started work nearly a year ago, so she deserves a little trip, and her mother has been having a dreadful time with marital issues so we are dragging her along as well. This is an excellent plan as far as I am concerned because it means that the ladies can go and worship at the twin shrines of temples and shopping, leaving me free to concentrate on shooting the shit out of our chosen location, carefully negotiated by yours truly on the grounds that it is meant to be one of the more photogenic spots in the region.

As you can gather from the last post, I have been out shooting macro again. Yesterday there were three of us on the trip and my truck was not going to be sufficient for the job unless we stuffed someone in the back, and that would be rather uncomfortable; not that I really cared because I was driving.

Then she who must be obeyed stepped forward and offered me the use of her transport, little realising the extremely rutted and muddy track I was going to take it down and, with luck, back again. Still, I was heartened by the immortal words of P.J. O’Rourke in his seminal piece “How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink”:

“Mud, snow, water, woods – you can take a rented car anywhere. True, you can’t always get it back – but that’s not your problem, is it? " Swap “rented” for “she who must be obeyed’s” and the problem was resolved. Her car would get us where we needed to go, we would worry later about getting it out of whatever hole I parked it in.

Our intrepid gang comprised Ian from PattayaDaze, neighbour Nik with his fancy OMD, and me. I would say the trip went well, apart from a spirited disagreement on American foreign policy on the way home, but no blood was spilled; which is more than you can say for the results of American foreign policy.

As usual, Ian spotted the bugs, we said “where?”, and a good time was had by all.

I am really warming to this macro lark. In many ways it is like photographing polo ponies. You take a shitload of shots, but it is not till you get home that you discover whether or not you have anything of worth. With polo ponies, success is measured by an interesting shot, preferably with all the legs off the ground; something the human eye is incapable of discerning. With macro it is all about nailing focus and producing a shot showing details that the unaided human eye is incapable of discerning.

The big difference between shooting polo ponies (or temples, or people on the street) and macro insects; is that for the big subjects you have a pretty good idea that they will be where you expect them to be when you go to shoot them. When you head out into the undergrowth you never know whether or not you will see anything worth photographing, or just end the afternoon with dirty feet, mosquito bites and a wife’s car stuck in a ditch.

Even you do spot something (or more likely, Ian spots it for you), the success rate using the camera hand-held for macro is very low. My success rate using the camera on a tripod is also very low, because the target subject rather unreasonably fucks off as soon as I start disturbing the undergrowth with tripod legs. So when some small creature stays still long enough for me to erect my tripod, get into position, obtain some sort of focus and get a shot, it feels like a minor triumph. And when I get home and find that some of the perceived minor triumphs are actually useable shots, well it makes it all worth while.

Yesterday I took 204 shots in two hours, of which twelve remain on my computer as deemed acceptable for retention. Here are some of them:

In August of this year I became the lucky owner of an Olympus 75mm lens. I wrote a review of it here and have since used extensively. It is a stunning lens in every way and I love it dearly.

More recently I had a chance to try out the new Olympus 60mm macro and was impressed, sufficiently so that I soon added one to my collection and have been bombarding you with macro shots.

So, given the choice, which should you buy?

This may seem like a stupid question, similar to “should I buy an armchair or a wristwatch?” (I get asked this a lot). After all, surely the 75mm is designed to produce shots like this:

On my way to a location to take some shots in support of an upcoming crucial “how does the Olympus 60mm macro compare to the Olympus 75mm for general shooting” post (you have been warned), and I pass a couple of shrines which sport an unusual zebra theme. I recall a brief post about this place a couple of years ago, but the population of African equids (yes, I looked it up) has blossomed considerably since then.

Whipped out the 75mm for a multi-zebra shot; but then wished I had something wider with me for a more general view. Then I remembered that I had the crazy little body cap lens in the front pocket of my bag so knocked off a couple of shots with that. I revise my opinion, it can be useful.

Another outing to play with my new macro, and who better to take as my shooting companion than the proprietor of Pattaya Daze?

Not only is he good company and an enthusiastic photographer; he has also developed an almost uncanny ability to spot macro subjects in the undergrowth, honed through many years of daily walks hunting small beasties.

We stopped on a quiet country road and started to look for targets. I saw a sea of green. He saw spiders, lizards, snails, butterflies, moths. He would then point them out to me and I would see a sea of green. With some further pointing I finally spotted the prey. Had I been on my own, I would have come home with a photos of a leaf and a snail; and not a very good snail at that. Instead I came home home with these:

She who must be obeyed was in a contemplative mood yesterday.

Do you know that tomorrow is 12/12/12?

Not in Thailand it isn’t. More like 12/12/55.

Don’t be difficult. It will be 12/12/12, and we have to kiss at 12:12.

Why?

Because it will be good luck.

Why? Don’t be difficult.

Of course she forgot, but I set an alarm on my phone and at 12:12 I planted a kiss on her lips.