Low Tide Shellfish Macro

I got a very nice macro lens this spring as a post-overtime reward and have been very happy with it. For those of you that follow such things, its a 60mm equivalent that can do 1:1 macro and has a focusing distance about an inch from the end of the glass. Low tide offers some pretty great macro opportunities and a few are below. Starting off with an oyster which most of you can imagine the scale of from experience.

Below is a snail on that oyster. You can see the one in the picture above as the little black dot near the top of the lip of the oyster. The biggest trick with pictures at this magnification is the focal depth is incredibly shallow and its very easy to have your intended object out of focus with the tiniest movement. Case in point only part of the snail below is actually in focus.

Here we have some barnacles feeding underwater. Their shells are maybe the size of a pea, which should give an idea what this new lens is capable of. For those of you bored by camera tech I do have a few barnacle fun-facts: they begin their lives as little swimming larvae which eventually glue their heads to a suitable surface and then spend the rest of their lives catching food with their feet. Throw in being hermaphrodites with the largest genitals-to-body size ratio of any animal in the world, and maybe you don't really want to be looking at them much closer than this ;)