Quite often when I want to capture great close-ups of one of my favourite subjects, flowers, there is a challenge to be able to approach them physically close enough to use a traditional macro lens. That's when I reach for a closer focusing tele-zoom lens like my 40-150mm f4 Pro (80-300mm crop factor equivalent) used typically on my ultra compact OM-5 MFT camera and start making tele-zoom close-ups.

Having a lot of distance between yourself and your subject that comes with the use of a longer tele-zoom brings several advantages...

Like light, you can much more easily take advantage natural light and you are far less likely to have unwanted shadows cast on your subject by you or your camera.

Then again composition, because of the nature of having to work from more or less fixed distances and often fixed positions too, then zooms really help with composing an image.

Plus depth of field is greater than with a macro lens which is a boon in close ups and this is aided by use of the MFT format too so the need to focus bracketing is greatly reduced.

Further, the longer focal lengths makes it easy to use its shallower depth of field to maintain focal separation to allow your subject to stand out against its background.

Whilst f8 is one of my favourite apertures for this sort of work, I do like to experiment with wider apertures especially when the background is closer and I still want to maintain that lovely back ground blur.

So using a tele-zoom lens is great way of keeping your distance whilst getting in close and creating great close-ups of garden flowers or anything else that grabs your interest like bees or butterflies or fungi or... 😀.