Inside a macro photographer's kitbag: Oliver Wright's essentials

Since then, Oliver's photography has received top accolades in the British Wildlife Photography Awards and been published in magazines and newspapers including BBC Wildlife and The Observer. He now splits his year between summers focusing on wildlife macro and winters in northern Sweden, leading groups photographing the wilderness landscapes.

"I've been asked to photograph everything from rare lizards in Ecuador through to King Carl XVI Gustaf in Sweden," he says of his career. "There's a huge range of photographic situations I've found myself in, through following a passion."

The Canon EOS 5D Mark IV has been his stalwart over the past four years, often paired with a Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM lens. Since the release of the Canon EOS R5, Oliver has moved to the mirrorless system and he was one of the first photographers to use the L-series Canon RF 100mm F2.8L Macro IS USM. Here, he shares his experiences using the lens and discusses his other macro kitbag essentials.

"The Canon RF 100mm F2.8L Macro IS USM allows you to do things quite differently," says Oliver, who photographed insects, reptiles and amphibians inside a butterfly house. "It allows you to go all the way to 1.4x magnification, whereas the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM has a 1x magnification. You're 40% more zoomed into the image. That might not sound much, but it makes a huge difference to macro photography. When you combine that with the resolution of a Canon EOS R5, it's pretty staggering."

An advanced stabilisation system and f/2.8 maximum aperture produces stunning image quality, even in low light, while Dual Nano USM motors offer fast and silent focusing, ideal for both stills and video. "This lens is super sharp and really well controlled," says Oliver. "You can zoom right in and see the veins in a gecko's eye. I've also photographed butterfly wings and when I zoom into those, I can see the individual scales."

The Canon RF 100mm F2.8L Macro IS USM also introduces a variable Spherical Aberration Control mechanism, to adjust the look of out-of-focus bokeh areas and produce a soft-focus effect on subjects. "This is going to have really exciting opportunities from a creative perspective," says Oliver. "Whether it be macro, product or portrait photography."

"Moving from a Canon EOS 5D Mark IV to a Canon EOS R5 has been a game-changer," says Oliver, who particularly appreciates the electronic viewfinder of the mirrorless system for its instant view of how his photograph is going to look.

The viewfinder also offers other key benefits to Oliver's style of shooting, such as focus peaking and focus guide. "For a lot of my macro photography I actually have the focus system turned off," he says. "With focus peaking, as I move backwards and forwards, I can see which part of the subject is going to be in focus.

Packing both high speed and high resolution, the Canon EOS 5D Mark IV is a formidable macro partner and remains Oliver's back-up body.

"It has been a superb camera for macro," he says. "Because it's full-frame, you get these huge files out of it, with really good noise control – especially for the kind of shooting I'm doing. I tend to use natural light, so I'm often shooting at fairly high ISOs, but don't want much noise in there."

Oliver's taken the camera into extreme environments, including temperatures as low as -38°C, and it's always stood up to his demands. "I've never had a single error message," he recalls. "I've taken hundreds of thousands of pictures with it. It's been a superb workhorse."

Oliver's worked with the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM for a decade and says it's his most used macro lens. "The 100mm focal length is a really good working distance for macro. If you have subjects that are quite skittish, you don't have to get too close to them. It gives you a reasonable working distance with a nicely compressed background."

Over the years Oliver has relied on its crisp focus and 1:1 magnification to capture incredible detail in everything from snakes in the jungles of Costa Rica through to jumping spiders closer to home. "It's one of Canon's sharpest lenses," he says. Its Hybrid Image Stabilizer system further counteracts both regular angular shake and lateral shift-shake, making it perfect for photographing small subjects.

"The new Canon RF 100mm F2.8L Macro IS USM feels very similar in the hand to the EF 100mm f/2.8L Macro IS USM, so if you're moving from one lens to the other, it's going to feel quite familiar," says Oliver.

This high magnification lens allows Oliver to capture extreme close-ups at up to 5x life size, without the need for extra accessories. With UD-glass elements to suppress chromatic aberrations, which often become apparent at high magnifications, it offers crystal clear detail of tiny insects.

"If I see a butterfly and it's covered in morning dew, I'd take some photographs with a 100mm macro lens, and however I compose it, they'll tend to be of the whole butterfly," he explains. "If I want to do a high magnification portrait, mainly made up of its eye or shoulder, I'll use the Canon MP-E 65mm f/2.8 1-5x Macro Photo for the much higher magnification.

"The Canon RF 100mm F2.8L Macro IS USM overlaps with the Canon MP-E 65mm, so there will be more times when you can keep the new lens on rather than having to swap lenses in the field, but this goes way beyond in terms of magnification."