Hi all. My first topic post so be gentle. I did do a search and saw quit a few macro lens questions but nothing that I recognized as what I am asking here. If I missed it, I apologize.

Anyway, I have become intrigued with macro photography so I have been doing some research and reviewing examples considered by peers as excellent to see what/how the final product was produced but no definitive pattern has emerged that I can see.

I don't have a macro lens....never have. One thing I have noticed is that macro lenses seem to be bunched into two categories as it pertains to speed.......f2.8 and f5-f6.3. I understand that f2.8 has shallow dof and would generally require a lot of pics (at various points of focus) stacked up to achieve the dof I see in the excellent examples. The slower lenses tend to be zoom lenses (but some fast macro lenses are zooms as well) and they give greater dof so you might not need to stack any pics or only a few.

But then I read that some lenses portrayed as macro lenses are really not and I get confused. The primary benefit of macro lenses as I understand it is their superior clarity so it seems like any lens labelled as macro would have some minimum clarity to be qualified as such.

My questions are for anyone that actually does macro photography and are:
1. Other than dof, does either the fast or slow macro lenses have other pros and/or cons I should be aware of?
2. Are there any lenses labelled as macro I should steer clear of? (I am not looking at bargain basement here.....let's assume I would spend $400 or more.)

Thank you for your time and I hope I didn't waste it.

Andy

Some lenses labled as macros, has nothing to do with their "clarity/sharpness", all those lenses are marked as macros, because they feature a "decent to very short minimum focus distance, but that does not make them macros, those are in general zoom lenses that will get you very close to your subject. A real macro is considered that, because it can record an image at a ratio of at least 1:1, that means it can record at lifesize. Most all zoom lenses are not capable of doing that, there are only very few around. So right away, if looking at a zoom lens, if it says it is macro, - it is not!