Photo Corners headlinesarchivemikepasini.com


A   S C R A P B O O K   O F   S O L U T I O N S   F O R   T H E   P H O T O G R A P H E R

Enhancing the enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. Published frequently.

Friday Slide Show: Mysterious Macros Share This on LinkedIn   Tweet This   Forward This

15 July 2022

We've been itching to mount a lens on one of our Nikons with a reversing ring. It turns any lens it fits into a macro lens, focusing as close as the film plane to the back element (which becomes the front element).

So we put a 35mmm f2.8 Nikkor on our Nikon D200 with a reversing ring and let it sit around all week. That way we could pick it up any time at all to try a shot or two.

And it left our other cameras, which we use a lot more than the D200, available for anything else we might want to capture.

But it turns out we were having too much fun with the D200 and its extreme macro to shoot with anything else all week. Well, except for our smartphone, which we used to document some peculiar phone wiring and a few other pedestrian tasks.

The captions will reveal what you are looking at. We won't ruin your fun here.

Macro mode can be a lot of fun and a reversing ring makes for an inexpensive macro mode on cameras otherwise without macro.

We will say they were all taken at f8, which we thought would give us 1) enough depth of field and 2) enough light to focus. We could have used a little more of each, though. Which probably proves our point.

We did have to adjust Exposure, Shadows and Highlights on nearly every shot to compensate for our aperture choice.

We used three different light sources. Sunlight through a cloud cover, an LED light bulb and an LED macro flash with sunlight. In that order.

Some of these images were improved with some cropping. Which only enlarged the macro shot.

We have no excuse for the red popcorn rose. It's blurry. We could no more hold the camera still than stop the wind. But we just love the color and the undulating flow of the petals. So it survived the cut.

There's some serious fringing on the backlit images that end the show. We elected not to defringe because it was so serious. Sometimes the cure is worse than the disease. The real cure would have been to go monochrome but we didn't find the color fringe that distracting. Instead, we adjusted the color and tonality of the backlit areas of the image.

Macro mode can be a lot of fun and a reversing ring makes for an inexpensive macro mode on cameras with interchangeable lenses.

It's also a challenging task. Not all of these are quite as good as we might have made them if we'd taken more than one shot, tethered the camera so we could see what was really captured and made some intelligent adjustments.

But they are all food for thought in one way or another.


BackBack to Photo Corners