The gray days of winter tend to keep me indoors, because they’re uninspiring more than anything else. And one of the classic ways for photographers to cope with being stuck indoors is macro experimentation. And, as with anything else, more experimentation tends to lead one toward extremes: Just how far can I push this?
Pushing macro photography to extremes means trying for ever higher magnifications. Even with some expensive lenses, things tend to top out at 1:1 magnification. There are some lenses that go beyond this, but they tend to be specialized and pricey. No one wants to break the bank just for the sake of whiling away a few winter afternoons.
Fortunately, there’s a relatively inexpensive way out that can get you to enormous magnification ratios quite inexpensively: A bellows. And for real money-saving, look for an old screw-mount bellows.
In case you aren’t familiar with bellows units for 35mm cameras, they’re merely a way of carrying the idea of an extension tube to extremes: They move the lens farther away from the camera, thus decreasing minimum focus distance and increasing magnification.
With the money-saving trick of buying a screw-mount (also called M42 mount), you’ll need an adapter to fit it to any digital SLR, but these adapters are inexpensive and available for virtually all camera makes. And for mounting the lens on the end of the bellows, you just need an M42 lens reversing ring. A reversing ring allows you to mount a lens backwards, with its “front†element facing the camera and its “rear†element toward the subject you’re photographing. This usually gives you higher image quality at high magnification but, more significantly to the budget-minded, allows you to mount almost any lens. Because you’re reversing the lens, you’re mounting it by its filter threads, so you only need to match the filter thread of your lens to that of the reversing ring you’ve bought: The complex lens mount is irrelevant.
So here’s the drill: Go to eBay (or even a local camera shop that has old stuff) and pick up an old screw-mount bellows. I got mine for about $25.00. Then get a lens mount adapter for your camera make and an M42 reversing ring, both available new for $15.00-$25.00. I spent less than $60.00 (not including the camera, lens & tripod!) on my set up, shown below:
If you don’t have a suitable lens for reverse-mounting (short primes, f/2.8 or faster work best), you can pick up something cheap on eBay or any other source of old camera gear. Remember, the lens brand and/or mount is irrelevant because its going to be mounted by its filter threads. That’s a Pentax SMC-M 50mm f/1.7 shown in the photo above — probably under $30.00 on eBay these days.
You’ll be amazed by the results you can get with very inexpensive primes. This is largely because a lot of superb old prime lenses aren’t compatible with the latest digital cameras (Canon and Minolta/Sony suffer worst from lens incompatibility, Nikon is pretty good, and Pentax best). Bellows mounting of a lens inherently bypasses autofocus, automatic aperture stop-down and other modern features, so old lenses are on equal footing with new lenses in that regard. Reverse mounting removes even the issue of lens mount compatibility between brands.
My own experimentation in this area was inspired by my friend Mark Cassino, who does simply amazing snowflake photography with this kind of set-up. You can see his photographs at www.markcassino.com.
Thumbnails of my first two efforts are shown below. They’re (tiny) orchids in my kitchen, at approximately 2x magnification. (Click either thumbnail to see a larger image.)
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