the moof said:
holy ****. how much did you pay for this stuff?
camera model, and all tool names please?
Well, the expensive part was the lens I used for the first shot (the moon). It's a Sigma 80-400mm F4.5-5.6 APO DG OS, and it's big enough and heavy enough (but waaay too expensive) to be used effectively as a boat anchor.
It was expensive (~$1k), but I think it'll be worth it when I get my next chance to shoot birds in flight and that sort of thing. The OS part of the lens model means "optical stabilization", which means it compensates for your hands shaking when you're zoomed out to 400mm and trying not to get a blurry picture. But it weighs 4lbs, and even though that doesn't sound like a lot, try holding a can of paint a foot in front of your face for 5 minutes and see how much you like it.
The macro toys weren't actually all that expensive. The main thing was a $35 Br-2a adaptor. The Br-2a is actually a lense reversing ring, which I used to mount my 50mm prime on the camera backwards. Yes, I said *backwards*. :twisted:
See, the trick is, a 50mm prime lens is a wide-angle, landscape type lens. It's meant for taking pictures of wide spaces. So if you flip it over the other way, it does the opposite: takes pictures of very tiny things. When you flip a lens over backwards, though, you no longer have such nicities as autofocus or aperature control, in fact no automatic anything or even any kind of focus. So you have to use a lens with a manual aperature control, and focus is achieved by varying the distance to the subject. So for the dime shots I used a reversed 50mm prime, a 2x converter, and 4 inches of extension tubes, which gave me an effective reproduction ratio of 5:1 (5x life size). Then the problem is that at that kind of magnification, your depth of field is literally less than a millimeter at high aperature settings. So I had to go down to F18 to get that shot, which meant a 5 second exposure to get enough light to be able to actually see it (I obviously used a tripod, no one can hand hold a 5 second exposure). It's a fairly complicated and difficult process, but you can get some amazing photos with it with a little work. I plan to do some stuff with water and other liquids, not to mention some tiny insect shots.
It's a neat trick, but it takes some patience and a lot of light to get it to work. My next "macro toy" will be a 28mm landscape lens, because it should allow me to get up to 6:1 when reversed. :wink:
I guess I could use it for landscapes too.
The camera is the same Nikon D70 that I've been using for a while now.
ryanm
