blue peter lens

[_dobbo_]

As I go into day 45 without an internet connection at home (thankyou very much Sky Broadband) I find that when I'm working lates my boredom levels hit a record high.

So I decide I'll fashion myself a super macro lens, following on from my earlier attempts with stacked lenses

10 minutes later and I've got one big pile of kitchen roll, and one of these:



It's a 50mm f/1.8 reversed onto a Kitchen roll tube, I call it the Niiikooon 350mm f/1.8 Soopermicro.

Moving swiftly on, first results were crap, hand holding it is a non-starter, so I rigged up an elaborate balancing act, and draped a black t-shirt over the lot to stop any stray light getting in, since the connection between cardboard tube and camera body was hardly high-tech.

At these levels of magnification stuff starts to look quite different...

Grooves on a record:


Some speaker wire


A bit of my hair


Some nylon string


Grains of sugar


Obligatory lens cap shot


My fingerprint


The edge of a door key:


The lion on the back of a 10 pence piece


I'd say about 3 or 4mm of subject fills the entire frame, so I guess this makes the magnification level about 5:1

[Graham@Reading]

Nice one.

It's the cardboard end that's pressed against the bayonet on the body, yes?

[megy]

Nice photos there, they look good. Instead of just holding the tube to the camera, you can buy the machined adapters off eBay for about £11, if you could somehow attach one of them to the tube then it might be a bit less likely to allow light in.

Impressed though, even if it is only Niiikoon

[crmcatee]

Impressive.

If you wanted a say 328mm lens would you just chop a bit off the end ? Can't wait to see you try with one of the large cardboard tubes that comes with the 1M of jaffa cakes in them.

[UKBob]

Very impressive, I love the shots, are they uncropped?

[megy]

Is it still the same as in your other thread where its just the centre of the frame thats image, the outside being black in a circle shape still.

[_dobbo_]

Graham - yes it's the carboard end that goes up against the body. I tried fixing it in place but it didn't work out.

Just found these camera bellows for £20 so you'd basically have to be a bit silly to make one yourself.

Bob, these are all uncropped except for the grooves in the record which is about a 30% crop.

Edited by _dobbo_ on Thursday 23 November 20:17

[RobDickinson]

No vinigareting?

I assume then thre all shot at f.18 wide open..

[_dobbo_]

RobDickinson said:

No vinigareting?

I assume then thre all shot at f.18 wide open..

Nope, at f/1.8 the DOF is probably about 0.01mm, and totally unmanageable. These are shot at about f/5.6 if I remember. Anything more than that and there is insufficient light to see the subject.

Still required an SB600 set on remote mode with a sto-fen diffuser fitted to light them, otherwise long shutter speeds are required.

I was surprised that there was no vignetting, but I suppose these are just a very poor man's extension tube, so vignetting shouldn't happen at all.

The camera reads f/0 when you run it without a lens!

I'm really keen to re-visit the grooves on the record one, it was a nightmare to light it correctly, so this one didn't come out at all as I hoped. I think a 100% crop could look mad...

Edited by _dobbo_ on Thursday 23 November 20:19

[RobDickinson]

I assume then the nikon 50mm has manual appature control?

[_dobbo_]

Yeah, it has an aperture ring on the rear of the lens. It seems the kit lenses don't but most of the non-digital lenses have one. All my lenses do except my sigma 10-20.