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Macro + Screws + Water + Metal (macro lens #3)

Pietro Zuco — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 11:27:26 +0000

More pics about macro. Lately I’m starting to discover a new world, the microworld, the micro universe. Well it’s still not so micro, but anyway from a human point of view, everything that cannot be seen by our primitive eyes do not exist so let’s show those details that are there hidden by small sizes.

So I created a new group on flickr, the Macro Hackers group. Why hackers? Because everything is acceptable to create Macro photography on that group. From hand-made-macros to professional and expensive equipment. The important thing is to use the imagination to catch that part of the small world that escapes from our daily life.

Water and aluminum rings.

A lonely screw…

Heads of what? Do you know what is this thing?

Water over a metal surface….

Check the entire Macro set on Flickr

Drops on a metal surface (macro lens)

Pietro Zuco — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 10:42:30 +0000

Playing with my hand made macro

Drops of water and a mysterious fluid over a metallic surface. For your information the metallic surface comes from a Sun E-250

One yen coin covered by some drops of water.

What is the mysterious fluid? And what is the thing inside?

Does it have the shape of a heart?

It seems an egg but it is not…

How to make a powerful and cheap macro part 2

Pietro Zuco — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 16:41:18 +0000

Well it was quite a time since I posted the How to make a powerful and cheap macro , a post showing how my friend Pepe created a simple and cheap macro.
I was thinking about the possibility to change this process. Actually reversing the lens has two inconvenients:

1. We cannot control the aperture (f-stop) using the camera controls and
2. we cannot control the focus mechanism.

The way I found to make it (this is not my discovering, I’m sure someone else has already noticed this) is a little more intrusive with the lens. You actually have to dedicate a lens for this only purpose, so please don’t do it with expensive ones. I bought this one as a junk lens for 1000 yen, that is around 6 euros. The interesting part is that you can control the aperture directly with camera controls, which is a really convenient thing, believe me!

Buy a normal and inexpensive wide angle lens. For example using this Nikkor 18-55mm. The wider the lens is, the closer you can shot.

Take out the plastic ring. It’s just sticked over the lens

There are four screws. These screws are used to fix the focus lens in the front. This first lens is used mainly for focus purposes. Because we are not able to focus this piece of crystal is useless. What we need is the other one, under this first lens. So let’s take it out and leave it in a secure place to use it in a future project :)

This is the lens I was talking before. Just remove it and leave your final creation with a big whole inside. The funny thing is that people not always realize that you just removed the front part. I remember that one guy told me “Hey you’ve lost the front part of your lens!!” ^^;

Here you can see the diaphragm. Instead of using it manually as in the previous article you can just fix the lens in a normal way, using the f-mount system and control the aperture from the camera.

Don’t worry about the auto focus. Anyway you are going to use it manually. The way to focus with this lens is moving the camera near or far from the object. This kind of macros has a really tiny deep of field so the only way to avoid this, in case you want to make the image as much sharp as you can, is to use a small aperture with an f-stop of 20 or more.

After shotting some 10yen coin I noticed a strange reflection in the picture. After spending some time figuring out where the hell that reflection came from (you can see it in the left side of the picture), finally I realized that it was due a plastic membrane around the second lens inside the lens-body. It’s a membrane maybe used to avoid reflections that could come back from the plastic components against the focus lens (the one we took out before). In this case we don’t need that membrane so just after taking it away the reflection was gone (see the right one).

The membrane I was talking before, is located around the second lens as indicated by the red color in the picture.

This is an example of what you can achieve with this macro. It’s huge and you need a good light source to work with it at f-stops of 20 or above.

How to make a powerful and cheap macro

Pietro Zuco — Thu, 07 May 2009 17:06:45 +0000

Read the second part of this article also

When I went to Granada with my good friend Pepe he showed me his hand-made macro lens. It was incredible the good quality and the huge macro than can be obtained with this technique. It requires a little bit of hand art skills and patience, but the results are really interesting:

Pepe taking a picture of a tiny piece of bread on the table.

As you can see in the picture, the lens is connected to the camera in the reverse sense. He took a body cover cap, removed the front part and leave only the Nikon F-mount part of it. Then he took a filter and after removing the crystal he attached the external ring to the previous modified plastic cover creating a single piece that can be attached to the camera body from one side and to the front of the lens from the other side.

As you can see in this picture the external part of the lens is the part that normally is inside the camera. Just the reverse!

Look at this 1 Euro cent coin with a Nikkor 24mm and see the next macro one using the same lens with the macro-technique.

This is a picture took by Pepe to the eyes of an insect.

Read the second part of this article also