As much as I absolutely adore my wonderful Nikon D50 digital SLR camera, I recently came to the inevitable conclusion that I needed to do something to help me get better close up shots.
As someone who largely uses this camera to photograph jewelry and small objects, the standard 18-55mm lens that comes with the camera does a great job compared to other cameras, but still not quite good enough when I want to get in very close. As a result I need to rely on doing a lot of cropping in Photoshop to get in really close, which usually leaves me with a finished image that isn’t as great as I’d like it to be.
I started poking around online looking for a proper macro lens and felt fairly disheartened by the cost.
So instead I decided to compromise and sought out these close up filter-type lenses which could simply be screwed onto the end of my current camera lens. Given that a set of these cost me around ten times less than what I was looking at for a proper macro lens, I was pretty happy!
Having now had a little play with them, I thought I’d share the results.
Note that these images were taken under my desk lamp or with flash so the colours aren’t accurate and they aren’t great shots by any means! However, they do show very well the difference these lenses make. I’ve cropped the original images at exactly the same size, so the degree of close up you can see really is the result of the lens filters and not the result of Photoshop!
The above image was taken with none of the close up filters attached to my camera – this is as close as my existing 18-55mm lens allows me to get.
This image was taken with all four of the close up lens filters attached. You can actually see (if you look very closely!) the marks my hammer has made onto the surface of my favourite handmade chain. And we like that!
And here’s another comparison side by side – the first using my camera with none of the filters attached and the second using the +10 macro lens filter.
I’m looking forward to taking some new photographs of my work using these lenses soon which I’ll share with you in due course. Keep your eyes peeled!
Thanks so much for that Simone! That is great info especially as that is one of the cameras that I’m considering. That is such a fabulous difference in close-upness, love that you can see the gorgeous textures so well. Yum, yum.
by MissMeshell on 6 April 2007 at 7:18 pm |
Sweet!
by Ginger Wagner on 10 April 2007 at 2:48 pm |
Very nice Blogger!
by Nataliya on 8 May 2007 at 12:18 pm |