There's quite a few bandstands around the river Main during the weekend, but they're so spread out that they don't interfere with each other. I spent around an hour with each band before moving to the next and I continued to do this all afternoon. When evening comes though, doing this is an impossibility because of the crowds. An estimated 3 million people attended during the weekend and moving around is a real problem.

Not only did I have fun taking a boat load of images, the music was pretty good too.

I really enjoyed myself during these bands playing. It gave me time to refine my focusing technique as well as testing how much DOF I get with each stop. As you can imagine they don't move a lot during these performances and it does give you time to test a few thing out.

The following images show what this lens is capable of. I like the rendition it gives and dare I say I can see some "Leica-ish" quality to the images. This is where you can take your time focusing on what you require and just leave it at that. Stop down a couple of stops and as long as the light doesn't change just snap away when you see something interesting.

This image is just to prove that I did get more than one image in focus during the hour that I spent photographing this event. This lens is really made for close up photography and not made to be a landscape lens. More images to come showing what I meant by that statement.

I just love this image. It's been worked on a little in LR4.x and Photoshop but I don't believe I've overdone it. Just look at the texture and colour in this tree. The bokeh is also something to write home about. This lens will be used quite often I think when on my walks around town.

Just wanted to show you a couple more of this fungus. If you can identify this, please let me know. This one was growing all on it's own, you can see a part of the rest in the background.

I found this fungus growing in the shaded part of a tree behind some bushes. I think it's the biggest and brightly coloured one I've ever seen. Really fantastic. Sometimes I tend to underestimate the amount of depth I need for a subject to be in complete focus. I made the mistake here, I shoud have stopped down another stop or maybe two. I still like this image though.

Background separation. Some like it some don't. Portraitists like it I believe because the subject is brought out as the image. Which is what they want of course. I managed to separate this foxglove because of the aperture I used and the distance to the trees in the background. Again I wanted to bring the foxglove to the fore as the main subject of the image and contrast was again high. Dialled in negative EV again so the background goes dark and press the shutter. It takes you a little time to get the focus right because you have to go beyond the focal plane and back again. I do this a few times before I decide on the focus point I need for the subject to be in focus. Fun though.