The Barefoot Photographer®

a photography blog

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Macro with the Nifty Fifty


I love that little 50mm 1.4 lens so much.  It is so fast and fun to use.  I was playing around in the front yard the other night with it and thought how I wished I had a close-up diopter for it so I could use it for some killer macros.  Then I thought about something -- the ProOptic extension tubes sitting in the house collecting dust.

I bought these way back at the beginning of the year and really have not used them much.  Recently I did play with them a little when I was working on some materials for a class focusing on macro.  They are fun -- they are inexpensive and they give you some awesome results.

So I grabbed the 13mm and the 31mm -- stacked them -- and then popped on the 50mm.  I took a test photo of a grass seed head without the extension tubes for a control.  You need to see what you are getting without them.  And then -- wow -- see what you get with those two stacked!  With these simple little gadgets you can turn any favorite lens into a macro.

When I started taking the photos -- it was hard to make myself get that close.  I was used to the regular minimum focus distance used with that lens.  The method I ended up choosing to get the very close shots was to put the camera on manual focus and move myself and the camera closer of farther away by tiny amounts at a time to get just that sliver of focus I wanted.  I could have done this same thing with a tripod -- moving the camera and tripod closer or farther to get the look.  I do this in the house some times when I am working on a certain look.

It is kind of fun to turn a weed into something fun.  

This topic was another revisit for something previously on the blog that seems to get a lot of hits. I like to go back to some that interest readers.  

Vintage Photo Friday will be posted tomorrow.  This post is Thursday.  If you are getting the blog delivered via email you may get two posts at once occasionally depending on the time of day I finish the post.

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2 comments:

Vagabonde said...

I like your pictures very much. I just found your blog from reading a Bulletin in the Cobb Photographic Society, which I also just found through Google. I’ll come back and read all your posts and also will come to the meeting next Tuesday. I hope I can join the club at the door. I bought a Nikon D40 after retiring last year and am still learning. I used my telephoto, a 55-200 lens, at Zoo Atlanta on Tuesday and many photos are blurred, so I have a lot to learn. I have posted some of my photos on my brand new blog, started about 10 weeks ago, here is its address if you’d like to look at it: http://avagabonde.blogspot.com/. I only used Microsoft Office Picture Manager to crop them or lighten/darken them, and that’s about it, so I know they are not very good.

Donna Rosser said...

Hi -- thanks for the comment. One thing -- I will be at the Cobb Photographic Society meeting this Monday evening -- not Tues.

Remember using a camera is like learning to play an instrument -- the more you do it -- the better you get!

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