OK, got your attention, eh?

This is a follow up to various other threads, including mention that you can reverse your standard lens, hold it in front of your camera and use it to get macro shots. I for one poo-poo'd that on the grounds that I am paranoid about keeping the 'time exposed to dust' (the time when there isn't a lens completely plugging the big hole in the front) to an absolute minimum. Worse still, if one was to use the camera to take shots while there isn't a lens firmly attached to it, the sensor being 'live' to take shots makes it even more of a dust magnet. Bad news!

However... I was reading an article in the Canon magazine 'EOS' (I recommend it to Canon users) on the subject (Jul-Sep issue, pp 54-59) and realised that you can plug the hole (and free-up your hands at the same time). All you need is a reversing ring. The reversing ring has the camera body's lens mount on one side and a lens filter thread on the other side. You simply screw the ring to the front of the lens, then attach it to the camera body. You will need to pick your lens first, then buy one with the correct filter thread. You will need to buy a ring with the correct camera body mount - Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Pentax, whatever...

Now to the lens - and this is the good bit...

While you can do this technique with your kit lens, or any standard lens, the main problem is in being able to adjust the aperture with modern auto everything lenses. It's not impossible, but it's a major faff. And if you can't stop down the lens, your depth of field will be wafer thin. Enter the solution... more or less any old manual lens you can lay your hands on!

If you get hold of an old manual lens with an aperture ring, you just do it all by hand. Even better if your camera has 'live view' - not only can you zoom in for accurate focus, but you can stop down the aperture (which makes everything very dark in the viewfinder) and live view will up the gain to show you the simulated (bright) exposure!

Even better, any old manual lens really does mean that - you can use a Canon lens on a Nikon camera, a Pentax lens on an Olympus, and so on and so on. So, what if you don't have an old manual lens kicking around? Well, I did a wee eBay search - just picked Pentax 50 mm lenses at random. The 6 I 'watched' sold for between £3.99 and £19.55.

I was going to pitch for one when a wee voice in my deepest recesses told me I needn't bother. I dug out an ancient Zenit from the garage. Built in Russia in 1980. I couldn't even work out the focal length of the screw-in lens, but it had an aperture ring and was a 52mm filter thread. I remember similar cameras selling on eBay for £1 (why it ended up in the garage), so I reckon the lens on this thing must be worth all of 50p! I bought a 52 mm reversing ring from an Indian eBay company for £5. Total value of kit = £5.50

I stuck them together and fitted it to my Canon 40D...


Here's literally the first shot taken with it...


I reckon if that is the first attempt there is definitely scope for further investigations. If this is what 50p of lens can produce, then....

The image, a size 10 fly, required a slight crop, so I'm reckoning it is slightly less than a 1:1 macro. The magazine article pointed out that with reversed lenses everything is the other way round, so a wide angle lens like a 24 mm will give you more magnification that a telezoom such as a 100 mm will.

The article reckoned that a reversed 50 mm lens will give you about 1:1, so I reckon my Zenit might be a bit more... but my suspicion is that it is probably a 50 mm. If you wanted to shoot mostly size 12s and 14s, I might look for a 24 mm or 28 mm lens.

The settings on the dSLR are no bother at all. It will tell you the aperture is '00', which just means it is not communicating with the lens. Set the camera to aperture priority, and it will choose the best shutter speed to match whatever you manually set using the aperture ring.

The only thing that puzzled me was that it seemed to make almost no difference whether I had the focusing ring turned to minimum distance or infinity So, I guessed at minimum and then moved the fly back and forth and used live view to eye-up maximum sharpness.

Col

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Cracking photo Col.
Who the hell comes up with these ideas in the first place? Or, who is daft enough to try with possible consequence of wrecking a camera?

Very interesting Col, I had look on Ebay to see if I could find a reversing ring for my Sony Alpha, no luck. I guess they must have them somewhere. I'll keep digging.
I wonder how a proper macro lens would work in reverse ?


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Eddie
"We look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation."
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Really interesting stuff Col.


I'm not going to try it.

The method is actually as old as photography. It wasn't any bother to film cameras to let a bit dust in - it could only affect one frame, but on a digital sensor it all builds up. I was kicking myself for not thinking about the reversing rings. No danger to the camera from fitting the body to a non-communicating lens - I use dSLR bodies at work attached to microsopes and the '00' signal is a common sight.

The one dodgy method I read about was to get aperture control from an auto lens used reversed. This is not recommended, repeat not recommended. Start with the lens on the camera and camera switched on. Stop down the aperture setting. Press the depth of field preview button, which will close the iris. While holding down the DoF button, remove the lens. The iris will stay closed. Mount the lens in the reversed position and take the shot. When you remount the correct way round and switch on, the iris will open. Repeat, this is not recommended!

Col

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Eddie - what's the mount on a Sony? Is it the same as Fuji or one of the other makes?

Col

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Col It's the same as the old Minolta, called the A mount


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Eddie
"We look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation."
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They were talking about these in Digital SLR magazine this month. This one retains the auto functions.

Novoflex - Reverse Adapter EOS-RETRO

Not cheap though.

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Sandy
Carried it in full, then carry it out empty.

Back in the days of film manual focus cameras, it was quite a common method to use reversing rings & coupling rings. The latter was simply a threaded bushing that enabled a lens to be reverse mounted by its filter thread onto the same of another lens attached to the camera in the normal way.

It worked better with prime lenses rather then zooms, I found. Both of these items were, then normal stock in your local Jessops store or from any number of places in the back of Amateur Photographer. You had to be very careful with aperture selection though, as light levels to the metering system was very much diminished with all the extra glass in front of the film plane.

Hi Sandy/

The article in EOS magazine featured that gadget as well. I couldn't help but think that if you had that money to spend, you would prefer to buy a macro lens with it

Col

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