Lessons
Class Introduction
02:36 2Lens Choice for Macro Photography
06:14 3How to Use Extension Tubes
06:06 4Inexpensive Macro Tools
08:01 5Camera Settings
04:16 6Camera Support
07:05 7Shutter Releases
03:29 8Lighting
06:52Lesson Info
Inexpensive Macro Tools
Well, let's say you don't want to spend 100 bucks on these extension tubes, what's your next option? Well, the next option is do it yourself. So those of you who have watched CreativeLive or been following me offline know that I do a lot of DIY type of stuff. In fact, that's my 10th book is The Enthusiast's Guide to DIY Photography, and the whole book is dedicated to make-it-yourself photo gear. Well, this is a make-it-yourself extension tube, and it's made out of PVC. Literally, go to the hardware store, you buy yourself some black PVC. Right here is a body cap from a camera, you know, the cap that goes right in the front of the camera. I just went onto Amazon and bought an extra body cap. Oops, sorry, I'll move it around. So here's a body cap for the camera, and then on this side over here, I've got a lens cap for the back of the lens, and you'll see how this all works together in just a second. I drilled out the middle with a hole drill, or a hole saw, basically, and drilled this on...
e out, and then I used superglue and glued them to the ends. And now what I've got, try to do this so I don't drop anything on the floor, is I can take my lens, and I put it in the lens cap section. See, it just mounts like that, and then the body cap segment just goes on the camera like this, and now I've got myself a super duper extension tube that cost less than, probably, four dollars. Three or four dollars. Now, I talked about, to his question about brightness loss, well, look at how thick that is. You know, that's, like, three inches. You're gonna lose a lot of light, and when you try to take photos here, a lot of times when you look through the camera, you know, it's like, "Oh, it's really dark." Well, I have a, no, I don't have a lens cap on there. (laughs) It's really dark! (laughs) (audience laughs) It is, and so, it's hard to see. One other point I want to make, and the reason why it is so dark, this lens, let's see if I can get it off there. There we go. This lens has what's called an electronic aperture. Electronic aperture. As opposed to that 50 millimeter lens that I had earlier, it had a mechanical aperture control. Remember the old-school lenses you used to be able to change the aperture by, like, rotating the base of the lens? You had to go f/11, f/16, f/22, click, click, click? Well, you really need that type of a lens to use this DIY type of a kit. So you can't, I can't get anything other than f/22 out of this electronic lens, whereas if use my 50, my nifty 50, everyone should have a nifty 50. There we go. Now I can just go click, click, click here on the lens, and change my aperture from f/2.8, f/4, f/5.6, f/8, like that, and now when I look through it, oh, yeah, there you are. Actually, you aren't there, because you're blurry. So let me talk one more thing about extension tubes, one of the frustrating things about extension tubes. Your focus range becomes compressed. In other words, now, with this, I can only focus from, let's say, from... Whoa. Oh yeah, one other thing, when you do the DIY thing, your lens can fall off pretty easy, so move slow, you don't want it to fall off. So here, I can focus right there and take a picture. Oh, don't need my flashers on the other side of the room going off. So that's the closest, I'm what? I'm about an inch away from the front of my lens? And then at infinity on my lens, infinity is right there. (laughs) All right, I don't think those came through. Yeah, they probably came through very black in Lightroom. You don't have to cut to that. But you get the point. My focus range now is very limited to about one inch to two inches away from the subject. Contrast that with an actual macro lens, this macro lens that can focus from here all the way out to infinity. So, sometimes you get a lot by paying a little bit more money for a high-quality product. So that's extension tubes, and this is DIY, making a DIY extension tube. I'm gonna pull that off before I drop it on the floor and ruin my nifty 50. I don't want to ruin my 50. Great. So let's talk now, oh, I've got one other thing. I forgot, this one's really cool. This one's great, because you also can do this very inexpensively. So I like shopping at thrift stores. We all like shopping at thrift stores, and a lot of times at thrift stores, you can find inexpensive camera gear. Here's a Pentax, it's a Pentax, I don't even know the model name. Oh, it's an A3000. I found this for $10 at my local thrift store. 10 bucks, and it had a 50 millimeter lens on it. I'm like, "This is sweet!" So what I can do is I can take this lens now, and I can mount it backwards, this is called reverse mounting. I can mount it backwards on my camera, and turn this little inexpensive $10 lens into a macro lens. Let me show you how that works. I'm gonna walk over to the gear table, and if I can find my little reversing lens, let's see, I'll do it right here. So what this reversing lens is is it has a Nikon mount on one side, and then on the other side, it's got a screw mount. So then, I can take that screw mount and I can screw it onto the front of my little nifty 50 from Pentax. (humming) There we go. And take this other lens off. Already, you can see, macro photography is all fiddly. There's just so many little things that work. Easy to drop stuff. So I just caution you, move slow. And then you just mount that onto the camera. Find the mounting mark, come on. There we go. So that 50 millimeter lens is now reverse mounted on the camera, and now I can focus like this, and then, remember what I said earlier about changing the aperture? Now I can change the aperture, because it's an old-school lens, I can change the aperture from wide open to closed down to f/22. So what do you get when you shoot with this one? Well, the same thing, your focus distance is very limited, in fact, in this case, there's almost no difference in focusing at infinity and focusing at the minimum focus distance. It's almost all right there, that's it. So that's at infinity. Here's at minimum. Right there. So it's pretty much the same distance in either case, but it's pretty, the photos that you can get are very high-quality, 'cause this is a high-quality lens, you know, it just happens to be 30 or 40 years old, but it's another very inexpensive way to shoot macro work. There, I've given you, what, six different ways to shoot with your, to shoot macro, from the very expensive to the very, very inexpensive.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Bonus Materials with RSVP
Ratings and Reviews
Audrey Reed
This is probably the 30th class I purchased, and the first I watched in full. I like the instructor. He is funny, engaging and obviously knowledgeable. I don't shoot marco and was expecting and introduction, and that is what I got. Lots of good info on gear and techniques. I am excited to try some of his ideas!
Linda
I learned a great deal. Taking photos and attending classes prior to this class. He showed examples of both bugs and flowers. Yes, he did use a Nikon camera but it is unrealistic for him to show all the examples that he did with several different brands of cameras! I have a Canon 5DM4. It doesn't have focus stacking yet. But I did learn that they applied for a patent. So it is coming. If you are doing studio work, the focus stacking is built into the Canon software that comes with the camera. For lighting I have the Canon macro flash that fits around the lens. I have the 100mm and 180mm macro lens. Just received Canon's two extension tubes today. They did work with the autofocus and camera settings. I thought his style was approachable. My macro work is all about flowers. His flower examples were on point. All in all, it was a solid class presented by someone who enjoys his work! PS The iguana's eye photo was stunning!