no macro lens? no problem.

[_dobbo_]

This weekend, after capturing the beautiful smile of the dog



I was inspired to have a mess around with macro photography. Problem is I don't have a macro lens. Never one to let silly things like that get in the way, I dredged up a recollection that you can reverse one lens onto another to achieve a poor man's macro. Armed with this knowledge and both a 80-400mm and 28-70mm, I had a go at hand holding the whole contraption, which turned out to be substantially harder than I anticipated, since all that kit weighs a fair amount.

I wasn't sure what focal lengths would work best and as I'm currently internet-less at home, I couldn't look it up so I experimented and found that the 28-70mm on the body at 70mm, with the 80-400 set at 80mm seemed to work best. Had to shoot at ISO800 in order to keep shutter speeds fast enough to hand hold.

You don't get full frame, because full frame looks like this:



but you do get some fairly interesting crops.

Like a bit of a credit card:



Or a lens cap:



And finally a bit of a cactus:



All fairly boring subjects but the technique is quite interesting and pretty hard to get right hand held. So who else is going to have a go and post the results? No cheating using real macro lenses!

[altrezia]

Wow! Good on you for trying something different.

That dog pic scares me, too.

[_dobbo_]

altrezia said:

That dog pic scares me, too.

He's absolutely soft as shite, and also scared of his own shadow. And scared of going outside in the dark. And scared of getting out of the car in a place he doesn't recognise, I could go on but I wont.

Little chap was half asleep at the time, so in reality he's even less scary than when awake.

[aspender]

Cool. You can also get a reversing ring from ebay to mount regular lenses the wrong way round to achieve a similar effect. Focus is only by moving towards or away from the subject

[te51cle]

Like the doggy and the quality is good but I would be very wary of hanging all that length and weight off the lens mount of the camera. Even when handling carefully you'll probably cause some damage sooner or later. The sticking two lenses together thing is really meant to be done with smaller, lighter prime lenses - some cheap manual M42 jobs off ebay would be good for this.

[_dobbo_]

I probably wasn't clear, but the lenses weren't connected to each other, just held in place with my hands.

Now that I have had access to the old interweb, I've been able to research a bit more about how to get the crazy magnification I was hoping for.

[jonathanp]

Here's a few examples of using a £15 Nikon reversing ring to mount a 50mm F1.8 the wrong way on a D50.

www.tomperkinsphotography.com/gallery.php?gallery=Macro

My 15yr old son's website by the way!

Jonathan

Edited by jonathanp on Monday 13th November 21:42

[therossatron]

jonathanp said:

Here's a few examples of using a £15 Nikon reversing ring to mount a 50mm F1.8 the wrong way on a D50.

www.tomperkinsphotography.com/gallery.php?gallery=Macro

My 15yr old son's website by the way!

Jonathan

Brilliant shots! How do you adjust the aperture with those reverse rings?

[_dobbo_]

therossatron said:

Brilliant shots! How do you adjust the aperture with those reverse rings?

Agreed, nice efforts. The aperture can be controlled with a dial on the lens itself when it's reversed.

[dcw@pr]

jonathanp said:

Here's a few examples of using a £15 Nikon reversing ring to mount a 50mm F1.8 the wrong way on a D50.

www.tomperkinsphotography.com/gallery.php?gallery=Macro

My 15yr old son's website by the way!

Jonathan

Edited by jonathanp on Monday 13th November 21:42

that's a REALLY good site, congratulations by proxy. I would bin the motorsport pics though, they look like what they are - some snaps taken at Goodwood, although they are well executed.

[JonathanP]

Thanks for the nice feedback - I'll pass them on to Tom. I think the biggest problem Tom found was getting enough light on the subject (lens needs to be stopped down quite a bit to get a reasonable depth of field), as the D50 internal flash only works in manual mode with the reversed lens - so I think all of those shots were natural light in the summer.

You do have to get rather close which makes getting the insect pictures a bit tricky - will probably get a 90 or 105mm macro lens next year.