Monday 21st February 2011

With a little bit of research and the help of my friend James at the weekend, I discovered that I can do reverse lens macro with my camera and lens which I'm quite exited about, so decided to give it a go tonight. Reverse lens macro is just what it sounds like - you remove your lens from your camera and turn it round and hold it back in situ, which means you can get achieve magnification levels greater than 1:1 (screen versus size in reality) i.e. items can appear a number of times larger than they are, e.g. 5:1. You must have a filter on your lens to protect it from inadvertant scratching, and there are various other accessories you can buy to make it easier, but you can do a basic test without the extras. It's quite tricky though, as the depth of field (the area of the image that's in focus) is much smaller than normal, so you have to be very precise with focussing, which is hard when you're an inch or two from your subject, hand holding a floating lens while changing the zoom and focus dial, don't have aperture control once you've taken the lens off the camera, and using two head torches jossling for the same space as the end of the lens to cast enough light on the subject. I'd like to experiment with this more taking pictures of insects, so I've ordered a reverse lens adapter ring. For tonight though this beautiful sand dollar served perfectly as a stationary subject. I like the way it looks so abrasive, whereas if you look at and hold it it seems reasonably smooth. The wonders of the world of Macro!

About 35mm (not recorded), 1/100s, about f/11 (not recorded), ISO 1600