I’m just coming to the end of post-operative recovery,
following eye surgery, thus, over the past week of so, I have had a chance to ‘play
around’ inside the house with some photography; and, in particular, macro
photography.
Although I have a 100mm F/2.8L macro lens and a set of
extension tubes, both of which I have used many times, I wanted to experiment
with a few other macro technics, namely, reversing my 50mm prime and bellows.
I already had a set of 2-axis focusing rails and therefore
all Amazon had to provide was a reversing ring adapter for my 5DIII body and a
set of bellows, all of course care of China Inc.
The reversing ring macro was OK, but I need to carry
our more experiments to convince myself that this is a useful approach. On this
occasion my main focus (sorry) was to get to know the bellows.
The setup was
pretty simple (see image below). I first put my 50mm prime on the 5DIII and set
the aperture I wanted to shoot at, ie F/16; I then carried out the ‘lens twist
trick’ to lock the F/16 setting into the lens. Of course the effective aperture,
because of magnification, would push the set up into ‘diffraction problem territory’,
but on this occasion I ignored that. In future I will likely lock the lens at
about F/8.
I then mounted the camera and lens to the bellows and the
camera-lens-bellows to the cross rail and a tripod. I set the bellows at just
over the 2x magnification point for the 50mm focal length of the lens, where
the depth of field was sub-millimeter (see one of the images from the stack
below).
Because I was using the bellows I could not use any auto
focus stacking tools, ie my Promote Remote, Cam Ranger or my Tethered
EOS-Utility. It was going to be handraulic test.
The third image shows the result from my first stack of 40
images, processed in Zerene Stacker. My subject was a small, dying (dead!) paperwhite
narcissus, with a piece of debris (just under 3mm long), which I had not spotted with my recovering
eye sight!
Although I give myself zero points for composition, I think
the overall experiment was a great success.
Bottom line: using a cheap (made in China) set of bellows, a 50mm
prime and a little patience, I believe high magnification, focus-stacked macros
are going to allow me to explore the small world that exists around us!
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