People have mentioned about wanting to get a macro lens, umming and arghing about it...but what are you looking at getting. It just dawned on me that my birthday is a little over a month away so I might as well give it a try with "Id like this macro lens for my birthday"

Obviously a £1k L lens is out of the question, but is there anything any good in the £200-300 range? Doesnt have to be new, but something that turns up fairly often on ebay at that sort of price so can be reliably acquired?

Try Tamron 90mm macro.

Am I maybe asking too much, given that my 17-85mm minimum focus distance is only 60mm longer than that macro lens? It probably adds up I guess, but doesnt seem quite "as epic" as Id like.

Im thinking, is it worth maybe selling my Sigma 70-300mm DG lens and using that money along with the birthday towards a better telephoto lens that has IS, USM, and a closer focus distance? The sigma was alright as an entry level zoom, but its uber soft and slow to focus.

The original Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro is excellent. Its pin sharp, has great bokeh and IQ. You should be able to pick it up in excellent 2nd hand condition for 350. I sold one recently for that much. New its a bout 400 ish I think.

Also does anyone even make a zoom macro lens which can do 1:1?



I only upgraded to the IS L one because I tend to hand hold.

"macro" zooms are almost without exception pretty poor. They rarely go beyond about 1:3, (almost?) never to 1:1 and are without known exception worse quality than the cheapest macro prime.

Sigma and Tamron both make very nice ~100mm macro lenses ( Tamrons is a 90, Sigmas a 105). This focal length is generally the best for general macro. The Sigma 180mm Macro is widely very well regarded but also very expensive, the ~100s give very good performance, acceptable working distance for living beastys and dont cost the earth.

The other thing with the 100s is that they also make a very useful fast short telephoto prime for candid portraits. They are incredibly sharp, so cropping is limited only by the number of pixels on your sensor.

I use an old Manual focus Tamron 90mm SP, which serves me very well indeed and cost £50 with a matched teleconverter.

Something Ive always found confusing are the 1:1, 1:2 scales etc. Care to explain it in laymans terms?

I think the thing that confuses me is the fact the way I see it, nearly all lenses allow you to photo something and then print it out at a size larger than IRL. I mean, I could happily photograph a 50p coin at a range hat fills more than half the sensor area and then print it at A4 size, and thats without a lens that reports any kind of scale, when surely its like 10:1 or something silly?

The other question is, for the obscenely close macros, are extension tubes and the likes being used then?

the ratio notation refers to the size of the image on the sensor.

An image taken at 1:1 is the same size on the sensor as it is in real life. The size of the print or the image on screen doesnt enter into it.

I think some manufacturors have occasionally made really specialised lenses which focused to 2:1 natively, but generally if youre going beyond 1:1 then youre going to need extension tubes, teleconverters, stacked reversed lenses or some combination of all three. A 50mm prime mounted backwards on the front of a macro lens works rather well if you want to get REALLY close.

this for example



If I recall correctly was a 35mm prime reversed on the front of an 80-200 zoom at 200 with two 2x converters.

Its the lettering underneath the queens head on a penny.

Edit: anyone asking "why the hell did he take that rather crappy photo?" yes, it is rather crappy, it was a challenge on another forum to see who could get closest to the aforementioned lettering. I didnt win.

I wonder if I could get closer with the microscope setup

EDIT:
Possibly...just looking through the eyepiece shows that your image is zoomed in a bit more, but if I used a lens on the camera rather than mounting it directly to the microscope I think I could zoom in closer...

Ive tried the 50mm reversed option, but not really played around with it too much. Looking into things the 100mm usm is likely a good bet.

If you want to get really close you can also check out the Canon MP-E 65mm f/2.8

5:1 !

I dont know of any true macro primes which are considered to be "bad", one or two stand out as even better than usual (The Kiron 105, original Vivtar Series 1 100, Pentax 200 macro, if Canon make an L series macro its probably stunning, etc) but even the Cosina 100mm f/3.5 is supposedly very good optically, just a bit plastic in terms of build quality.

Macros are never afflicted with "kit lens" syndrome, so anything with a well known lens makers badge on it is likely to be very good indeed.

This is what I get through the scope set up.

Coin by Chris_Moody, on Flickr


I tried it with the 10x eyepiece in place, and could get a very bad picture of just the B (I think its the B) zoomed in.

Quote from: zpyderSomething Ive always found confusing are the 1:1, 1:2 scales etc. Care to explain it in laymans terms?

1:2 or 1:1 scaling as has been said is the comparative size of the subject to its image on the sensor but this is for a 35mm sized sensor. A small sensor 1:2 will produce an image nearer 1:1 on small sensor cameras.

This says nothing about the output scale. You could take a picture of an insect at 1:1 and print it on an A6 page, or you could blow it up and stick it on a billboard. The original photograph scale is still 1:1

QuoteThe other question is, for the obscenely close macros, are extension tubes and the likes being used then?

Yes, Ive got a +4 lens but am considering some extension tubes or bellows.

Quote from: Seriousbut this is for a 35mm sized sensor. A small sensor 1:2 will produce an image nearer 1:1 on small sensor cameras.

no, 1:1 is always 1:1 whether its 35mm film, APS-C digital, or large format sheet film for that matter. Macro ratios only refer to the size of the image on the capture device (film or sensor).


How high a ratio you can go to before your image is larger than your frame is another matter entirely, but a 25mm subject remains 25mm across whatever camera you point at it, so a 1:1 image of said subject is also always 25mm across at the sensor plane.


Sorry to sound nit picky, but I feel its important to get things like this exactly right from the start to avoid confusion later and Zpyder is obviously just trying to get what can be a pretty wierd set of conventions straight in his head.

I actually got the idea once it was explained pretty quickly. Im almost tempted to go the whole hog and get the L with IS, but ultimately I think that extra money is wasted on the grounds of the chances of ever selling a photo etc being < 0.1%