Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Age is a matter of feeling, not of years." -- Washington Irving (b. 1783-04-03, d. 1859-11-28)

"Age is a matter of feeling, not of years." -- Washington Irving (b. 1783-04-03, d. 1859-11-28)

Okay, now I'm home for real. After an extra day and a half in Arlington due to running out of spoons, I replaced that tire yesterday afternoon and took Perrine back to Baltimore in the wee hours of this morning.

As promised, here are pictures of the high-magnification lens-combo that I used to make the Salt and Pepper macro photo that I posted Tuesday.

(For the sake of comparison, to the right is what I usually use for magnification between 1:1 and 2.4:1 -- for anything below 1:1 I most often just use a straightforward macro lens.)

Here's the entire setup that I was shooting with/at/on, showing the lens-combo mounted, giving an idea of its size, illustrating how I positioned the flash where I wanted it, and verifying that I did shoot it during daylight, as keith_m043 pointed out, in case anyone had any trouble believing that. (You can also see the specks of salt and pepper on my PDA's screen, which I didn't expect to be clearly visible in this shot.)

(If you click through to the Flickr pages for these photos, then click the "all sizes" button, you can see larger versions than what I'm posting in this entry.)

For a closer look at just the lens assembly by itself:

Since I was shooting digital, I could see after each shot whether I needed to nudge the flash a little closer or farther away -- with film, I would've had to do the math, and/or make a guess and "bracket" brighter and dimmer than that guess (and wait until the film was developed to find out whether any of the exposures had been correct. I've done shots like this on film before and have gotten some fun results, but this is one of the things that digital makes easier. Since I was shooting handheld (that's the one bit that I'll admit was a little crazy about the whole enterprise -- I was braced against the table but I ought to have been using a tripod) I had to hunt across the surface of the PDA each time to find the two grains I wanted while looking through the big lens.

As I described in my original entry, the parts that make up that threatening-looking long black club are: the M42->K adaptor, a 2x teleconverter, a 200mm f/3.5 lens, a clip-on lens hood (that I happened to notice was the same size at the 'away' end as the built-in hood on the 200mm lens, thus making it easier to tape the two lenses together -- it's shaped for a different focal length, but that didn't matter in this setup), and a 55mm f/1.8 lens.

Now I'm pretty sure I could have done this all with more modern lenses (I need to go through the camera bag that I took to Pennsic and see whether I remembered to include a K-mount teleconverter when I packed it -- I do know that I brought two Konika ones by mistake (I didn't bring the Konika cameras with me)) ... but the first 200mm lens I put my hands on that day was a screwmount lens, and I knew I had screwmount teleconverters, and the screwmount->Kmount adaptor was handy, so I went retro on the camera end of the stack of lenses. (The way I was shooting, the modern conveniences of more modern lenses would not have come into play anyhow.)

For the reversed lens, there was actually an advantage to using an old screwmount lens: because the iris actuator isn't connected to the camera when a lens is mounted backward (there are some adaptifiers that remedy this with an arrangement of cables, but I've never seen one up close, much less had the spare cash for one; I'm not sure how common they are) I had to stop the lens down manually for each shot. I could've just left the lens stopped down, but that makes the viewfinder dark and difficult to focus with. Most of my screwmount lenses have a "manual/auto" switch because they're designed to work on cameras so old that having the camera operate the iris hadn't been done yet, as well as with slightly newer ones that did have a way to do that. So with the right vintage of screwmount lens, I can just slide that switch when I'm ready to shoot ... or slip a fingertip over the actuator pin. (The K-mount lenses have a lever instead of a pin ... operating that manually probably wouldn't be too much harder, but since I haf the screwmount lenses handy anyhow, one of those just seemed easier.)

I think the 'hardest' part of all this isn't so much knowing exactly how to do it; it's knowing ahead of time that this is possible, that it's even one of your options. And having a suitable assortment of lenses on hand to stick together (whether with gaffer's tape or a proper 'reversing ring') of course. Practice does count for something here as well, but if you think this is fun, then you'll get the practice. ;-) There's a little bit of math involved, but not all of the formulae you'll see on web sites about macro photography actually get used in the field -- mostly, you need to have a rough idea how much light each technique will cost you and what conditions make different techniques more convenient or less so.

Even the imposing club of a lens looks less intimidating when viewed as a collection of ordinary parts...

Anyhow, that's how I did it (or at least what I did it with).

Okay, now I'm home for real. After an extra day and a half in Arlington due to running out of spoons, I replaced that tire yesterday afternoon and took Perrine back to Baltimore in the wee hours of this morning.

As promised, here are pictures of the high-magnification lens-combo that I used to make the Salt and Pepper macro photo that I posted Tuesday.

(For the sake of comparison, to the right is what I usually use for magnification between 1:1 and 2.4:1 -- for anything below 1:1 I most often just use a straightforward macro lens.)

Here's the entire setup that I was shooting with/at/on, showing the lens-combo mounted, giving an idea of its size, illustrating how I positioned the flash where I wanted it, and verifying that I did shoot it during daylight, as keith_m043 pointed out, in case anyone had any trouble believing that. (You can also see the specks of salt and pepper on my PDA's screen, which I didn't expect to be clearly visible in this shot.)

(If you click through to the Flickr pages for these photos, then click the "all sizes" button, you can see larger versions than what I'm posting in this entry.)

For a closer look at just the lens assembly by itself:

Since I was shooting digital, I could see after each shot whether I needed to nudge the flash a little closer or farther away -- with film, I would've had to do the math, and/or make a guess and "bracket" brighter and dimmer than that guess (and wait until the film was developed to find out whether any of the exposures had been correct. I've done shots like this on film before and have gotten some fun results, but this is one of the things that digital makes easier. Since I was shooting handheld (that's the one bit that I'll admit was a little crazy about the whole enterprise -- I was braced against the table but I ought to have been using a tripod) I had to hunt across the surface of the PDA each time to find the two grains I wanted while looking through the big lens.

As I described in my original entry, the parts that make up that threatening-looking long black club are: the M42->K adaptor, a 2x teleconverter, a 200mm f/3.5 lens, a clip-on lens hood (that I happened to notice was the same size at the 'away' end as the built-in hood on the 200mm lens, thus making it easier to tape the two lenses together -- it's shaped for a different focal length, but that didn't matter in this setup), and a 55mm f/1.8 lens.

Now I'm pretty sure I could have done this all with more modern lenses (I need to go through the camera bag that I took to Pennsic and see whether I remembered to include a K-mount teleconverter when I packed it -- I do know that I brought two Konika ones by mistake (I didn't bring the Konika cameras with me)) ... but the first 200mm lens I put my hands on that day was a screwmount lens, and I knew I had screwmount teleconverters, and the screwmount->Kmount adaptor was handy, so I went retro on the camera end of the stack of lenses. (The way I was shooting, the modern conveniences of more modern lenses would not have come into play anyhow.)

For the reversed lens, there was actually an advantage to using an old screwmount lens: because the iris actuator isn't connected to the camera when a lens is mounted backward (there are some adaptifiers that remedy this with an arrangement of cables, but I've never seen one up close, much less had the spare cash for one; I'm not sure how common they are) I had to stop the lens down manually for each shot. I could've just left the lens stopped down, but that makes the viewfinder dark and difficult to focus with. Most of my screwmount lenses have a "manual/auto" switch because they're designed to work on cameras so old that having the camera operate the iris hadn't been done yet, as well as with slightly newer ones that did have a way to do that. So with the right vintage of screwmount lens, I can just slide that switch when I'm ready to shoot ... or slip a fingertip over the actuator pin. (The K-mount lenses have a lever instead of a pin ... operating that manually probably wouldn't be too much harder, but since I haf the screwmount lenses handy anyhow, one of those just seemed easier.)

I think the 'hardest' part of all this isn't so much knowing exactly how to do it; it's knowing ahead of time that this is possible, that it's even one of your options. And having a suitable assortment of lenses on hand to stick together (whether with gaffer's tape or a proper 'reversing ring') of course. Practice does count for something here as well, but if you think this is fun, then you'll get the practice. ;-) There's a little bit of math involved, but not all of the formulae you'll see on web sites about macro photography actually get used in the field -- mostly, you need to have a rough idea how much light each technique will cost you and what conditions make different techniques more convenient or less so.

Even the imposing club of a lens looks less intimidating when viewed as a collection of ordinary parts...

Anyhow, that's how I did it (or at least what I did it with).