Try Tamron 90mm macro.

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.

"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.

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.

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

5:1 !

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.

but 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.