Originally posted by aslyfox nothing wrong with short cuts
I hope you will forgive me in not realizing you have joined the others who have contributed to the pollinator thread
to be honest, I haven't reviewed all of those post
Of course! No problem! My photos are not the most memorable in the thread, and in any case looking at the gear in that thread was excellent advice.
I did take my 100mm macro WR out today, and on my way home from work I managed to find some zebra jumping spiders out for a bit of spring sun. I decided to do a (sort of chaotic and unstructured) test of how far my lens would stop down. Here is a screenshot of four consecutive pictures, raw, with the settings at TAv, 1/320s, f18. In one of them (top left) the aperture seems to have behaved itself and stopped down for correct exposure. The next two are madly overexposed, and the lower right one just a little. Beyond f18, everything was badly overexposed.
This is better than I thought - before it went for service I definitely could not get the aperture as far down as f18. Maybe if I keep shooting and store the lens front down, the problem may eventually just go away. I am just not brave enough to take it apart myself, and I honestly can't be bothered shipping it to the UK, waiting for weeks and paying some unknown service fee plus shipping and handling for a procedure that didn't _exactly_ solve all problems last time...