Creepy Crawley
I shot 97 frames for this weeks Tuesday Challenge, trying to take a closeup photo of an insect/bug/minibeast.
97 frames.
97 sodding frames, and this was the only useful one.
That’s the most work I’ve put into a Tuesday challenge so far this year! I’ve spent more time on this than I did on Paul Atomicus. The problem is, I don’t have a macro lens.
My macro “solution” is an old Chinon 50mm f/1.7 prime and a macro reversing ring. This lets me mount the 50mm lens “backwards” on my camera (The bit that normally faces the subject, now faces the film/sensor) so instead of taking a big scene and making it smaller to fit on something the size of a postage stamp, the lens takes a scene the size of a postage stamp and makes it sodding huge!
I already had the prime (it’s one of the 4 I have for my 35mm slr collection, I really should cull some of those) and the reversing ring cost about tuppence from ebay a year or two ago. I think I paid more for the shipping than I did the ring itself.
This setup is all well and good, and wins all the cheap-as-chips points, but it has a couple of down sides. I lose the ability to control aperture/shutter speed automatically. This isn’t a huge problem, I shot manually back in my film days for long enough that I can cope with that, sunny 16 still seems to work well enough as a starting point.
The big problem is that I lose the ability to focus.
Not autofocus, focus.
For some reason I don’t fully understand (it probably involves physics and lots of maths) when mounted this way round, the focusing ring on the lens no longer makes a blind bit of difference. The only way to focus the shot, is to physically move the camera backwards and forwards.
With moving subjects (such as insects) and a depth of field measured in millimeters, this makes getting a useable shot a bit of a challenge to say the least!
I assume it’s dead?
If it wasn’t then, it was shortly after. It was on the head of my mop and I needed to wash the kitchen floor. Drowning in bleach probably isn’t the nicest way to go!