Macro Work – MP-E 65mm be damned
Have not shot much recently, work and Granger have had me pretty busy. However, I did get a chance to fool around with the 100 macro and 50 1.4 the other day.
I realized that now that I have another 58mm filter thread lens, other than the 85mm, I could do some pretty good work with it reversed on my 100mm macro. Typical rule is that at infinity, a flipped lens will result in an mainlens:flipped lens magnification ratio. So with the macro, I would be at 2:1 from the get-go with this setup. Still waiting to find a 58-72mm reversing ring for the 35 1.4L =D
I took some pictures on the new focusing rail, which works much better after a complete tear down and retightening of the unit. Before the slide would tilt and the worm gear would fail to engage. Now I tightened it and no more issues.
I placed the 50mm on the camera, hit the DOF preview @ f4, and then unmounted the lens to increase the sharpness of the lens, to prevent abberations and falloff.
After playing around at ~2:1 with the 40D mounted for “extra” mag, I started going to 1:1 on the macro. This got me pretty close, but decided to go all out. Threw all 3 extension tubes at it, and the 2X extender. These are the results, with approximate magnifications. The 5X shots were about 4 seconds long at F2.8, so I hit it with some flash, 1/250th @ f11. Still no DOF, but F32 was worse, so much diffraction.
