More ad hoc experiments with the Venus 15mm Wide Angle Macro (WAM)

Although the Venus 15mm WAM has the potential for 1:1 macro, in reality this feature is difficult to realise in reality, as the subject is only a few mm from the front of the lens. Thus the lens needs to be ‘throttled back’ to the sub-macro zone, say, 0.6 to 0.8.

Macro aside, the lens is also a pretty good 15mm wide angle lens, at a macro of around 0.1: where, at an aperture of F/16, the hyperfocal is about 0.8m.

Of course a post from me wouldn’t be complete without mentioning Magic Lantern and an insight into how ML enhances the image capture process.

The scenario below is a typical situation: an indoor capture with mixed lighting. Of course, shooting RAW means the White Balance is not a big issue, and can be ‘recovered’ in post, however, why not try and get is right in camera.

For those that don’t know, ML provides an in-camera custom WB capability, all obtained with a single button push, whilst in LV.

In the following boring internal shot of our sitting room, I used the ML RAW spotmeter, which provides Ev feedback, to set a base exposure centred on the darkest area I wanted to see detail. I then used the ML auto bracketing to ensure I captured the lighlights with the minimum number of brackets: resulting in a three bracket capture at 30s, 8s and 2s.

After ingesting into LR, and before post processing, I took the 2s exposure, created a virtual copy and reduced the virtual exposure copy by 2Ev. This ‘trick’ often helps when enfusing images in, say, LR-Enfuse.

Bottom line: although shooting RAW means that WB settings are not that important, why not get it right in camera and use the magic of ML.