Ok, so it turns out I do want a macro, just not the one I originally bought.

The 35mm lens is an ideal technical macro. My father-in-law will use it to it’s maximum potential, with his spider studies. I found it too limited creatively.

This is, I suppose the main difference between the main macro styles, creative or technical. We, like most image makers view our styles differently. John likes his street/travel images to be portrait style, I need mine to be documentary or unposed, he needs his macro to be technically sound and repeatable as he has a scientific application for the images, where I like mine to be creative, i.e. abstract and technically useless.

You could (I hope) make a book of pretty flower photos from my image bank, but not a useful book on plant recognition, where John has written a book on spider recognition!

The 60mm macro is longer and faster, giving me the more appealing Bokeh monster I like to use. I really felt that the 12-100/12-40 zooms could fill this space, but after clearing out my old film camera stocks, I had some money kicking around and the macro was the only (genuinely) useful addition I could think of for my kit.

It is also a useful light weight and weather proof portrait lens, falling in between the 45 and 75mm prime lenses and the 12-40 and 75-300 zooms.

The magnification is genuinely better. The left hand image is form a 12-100 “macro” image, the right one is from the macro (not necessarily the very closest focus distance for either, but pretty near).