Macro photography

Hello!

I dont know where to start because I'm confused about the thing...
Last week I was shoting a set of photos for some competition (flowers) and I decide to take a few macro shoots. I borrow a close-up lens +4 and I must say it's stinks. The depth of field is not worth mentioning and hard to focus, too. then I start to thing about the bellows or macro lens. What do You recommend more? I have Pentax Z-1 AF and Cosina semi-automatic CT-7 cameras, both with K.mount.

Good day :

Saso

The closer you get, the less depth of field, and there is no way round that! The best we can do is use a tripod, focus very, very carefully and use the smallest aperture possible. In this way, it should be possible to take very good close up pictutes. Close up lenses are cheap and quite good if stopped down, macro lenses are better. But it depends on what sort of enlargement you need, and for small printws close up lenses should be absolutely good enough.

I use the SMC Pentax 100mm Macro lenses, but always stopped down and always on a firm tripod.

Hope that helps!

Thanks John.

I'm satisfied with your answer but I'm not completely relieft.
I know that the depth-of-field with close-up lens is not so great if you dont stop down...
I use a firm tripod (Manffroto) and lens aperture of f/38 but still didn't get enough sharpness for the enlargement of 20x30 cm.
I was hopping that the macro lens would do the better thing. Is the DOF with your macro lens so shallow too?

Good day & good light to you all!
S.E.

You have asked a very straightforward question, but the full answer is not so simple!

Every lens in existence will have the same depth of field at a given aperture, for the same magnification. So, if we fill the frame with a butterfly a 100mm macro lens will have the same depth of field as a 50mm, but we will be twice as close with the 50mm. Of course, if we do not move the camera and take both pictures from the same distance the 50mm will have more depth of field, but the butterfly would be half the size on the film.

Looked at another way, you can't win with depth of field! At close distances the depth will be miniscule regardless of the lens you employ. A 100mm macro will give better results than close up lenses, especially when several close up lenses are used at once.

A thought: when you use more than one close up lens I think you are supposed to put the strongest one on first for best results.

It's difficult to know why you are not getting the sharpness you need without seeing the sort of picture you are taking - if you want to e-mail me a sample picture (small file size please) it might give some clues.

John, your assistance was very helpful to me.
With your piece of advice and advice of my colleagues at the photo club here in Slovenia I decide that I'll probably purchase the 100mm f/3.5 macro from Pentax. They thing it's a very good lens and worth each penny Besides that the lens can be used in portreture too so you have double value

Thanks again and sorry for my bad english. It's a little rusty

Very gooooooooooooooooooooooood day to you all and of course wish you a good light.

The diffused one from the side...

I use a Pentax A 70-210 f/4 lens with extension tubes all the time, I can get great DOF out of this set-up since my distance from the subject can be varied quite a bit. This lens on its own has macro ability, but when used in conjunction with the extension tubes... wow!
And the lens is incredibly sharp too...

Hi,

I use several types of macro or close focusing lenses for insects and wildflowers. I use Tamron, Sigma, and Pentax lenses and find that they all give satisfactory results. In the US, good used Pentax equipment is hard to find.

I enjoy using my Sigma 180 mm macro on my pz-1p. Better working distance than a 90 mm macro and the rotating tripod collar makes picture formatting easy. I recently purchased a Sigma 400 mm macro (1:3) and that lens + some extension will be good for butterflies. I prefer natural light, but have started using off camera flash for lighting up some subjects.

I do have a 90 mm macro and when used with a 1.4 teleconverter gives fairly good magnification and substantial depth of field. A tripod and shooting with a 2 second delay for popping up the mirror will also make your pictures more crisp. I use this lens for close-upsof tiny orchid flowers and it works fine. I did use a manual focus 100 mm F2.8 Pentax macro and that was a wonderful lens-well built and superb optics.

As for the best aperture, take some test shots at different f-stops. When doing macro work, I often use F16 or F22 rather than F32 because the slighter more open apertures may produce better imagequality than at f32. Another reason why I prefer the larger macro-telephoto lenses is that you can isolate a subject from the background with more open lens apertures.

Good Luck with your macrophotography.

As Always,

Jim Zablotny

I use a range of bodies (ME Super, K1000 and Super A) with either a Tamron SP90 macro lens - stunning) or 50 mm lenses with extension tubes. This latter option works very well, albeit with less flexibility than a macro lens. However, the small apertures needed to get a decent depth of field in close-up often produce diffraction softening of the image. For example, any lens, macro or not, set at f22 and used to produce a lifesize image is really working at f44, even if it's a macro lens. This means that the diffraction limit in terms of lines per mm is about 50 lpm (100 divided by f number). Combined with a film even as good as Velvia, this will give noticeably soft images at high enlargement.