Bellows question

This the clearance you have with *istD coupled to a Bellows K.



Bellows K.



D and coupling ring.



D with coupling ring attached.



Not a lot of room.

BTW, these shots are jpg's straight out of a 750Z with the basic macro setting.

Brian,

Thanks for taking the trouble to produce and share these images. Having seen them, I am cinvinced that I had to 'assemble' my bellows on my DS in the same way.

It's interesting to note that the grip doesn't get in the way.

I'm thinking that this setup would be 'safer' for the camera with the introduction of a 12mm (or similar) extension tube (as suggested by another forum member) between camera and bellows. Apart from the very complicated mathematics involved in calculating the magnification ratio or reproduction size (which most of us probably are not really interested in coz all we want is a big photo of something small), I can't see why it shouldn't still work.

The scales are out of the window in our Pentax digital world anyway because they are graduated for 50 & 55mm lenses and a 35mm frame size.

Pete, errrr !!!! I removed to grip before I attached the camera to the bellows. absulutely no way with the grip attached.

You're forgiven. Thanks for the feedback. I'd love to be trying this out for myself but my istD is in UK and my bellows is in Spain. Come Wednesday, we will all be together again and I can hopefully have some serious playtime.

Everybody . . . aaarrrrrr.

As you've 'got your kit out' so to speak, do you have a short extension tube you could stick between camera and bellows to see if that works. You might even be able to leave the grip on.

Actually, I think the bellows manuals suggest having the rig slightly lens heavy when on a tripod so it might benefit from leaving the grip on if possible as the tripod mount would then be closer to the camera body giving a bit more room in front to work in.

Here is it with a 13mm tube, still can't attach it with the grip, use a 21mm tube and you can leave the grip attached but then I think you would lose a lot of the bellows flexability. I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong.

I have a set of A (as opposed to Automatic) tubes that do have the contacts and they work fine with my Super-A and its 'A' lenses but they would not work with my istDS.

These tubes refused to work correctly with it and the reason turned out to be fairly simple but as is the way with technical stuff, it took a while to discover.

There is a contact on the lens which I think is the ground or return connection that ordinarily would connect to the body via a pin (or maybe just the exposed metal of the body mount) on the lens mount on the body. Adding 'A' extension tubes obviously needs to maintain all of these electrical contacts . . . but mine didn't.

The reason was that the lens mounts on each of my rings was painted black, which is a fairly good electrical insulator, and there was no pin connecting through the tube for this particular contact.

The solution was simply to scrape the paint off of the lens mount at the point corresponding to this 'ground' contact on each of the extension tubes. Jobs a good'n, all lenses then worked perfectly with the DS.

These are Jessops tubes (not the best I know but they served me well for a number of years) and whilst they wowrked OK (or seemed to) with my Super-A, they did not work with the DS until I carried out the 'surgery' above.

I discovered all this with the help of another chap who's name escapes me, but if he's a member of this forum, and remembers my dilemma from about a year to 18 months ago . . . thank you again for your help.

Outstanding. Thanks for taking the trouble Brian. Those images are impressive too.

Nice to see the info rolling in!