New toys!!

Today I got some new toys and I thought about making a little review about them. It won`t be that much yet, but I think a detailed review will follow in a few weeks.

So, what I`m talking about is called “Extention Tubes”. You use them for macro photography to be able to get closer to your subject as it`s usually allowed by your lens. They don`t contain glass at all but just extend the distance between your lens and your camera sensor.

For my test shots I used a 50mm f/1.8 lens that usually has a minimal focal length of about 45cm/1.5ft. by using all three of the tubes in a row you get close up to about 5cm/0.16ft. (don`t feel disturbed by the kitchen stuff!)

But it`s not just possible to get closer to your subject, you also get it much much bigger on your sensor. You get much more detail and even cropping your photo is kind of easier.

I took some test shots with the 50mm and a coin. By trying, I found out that you can get closer, but also the exposure time extends pretty much to get the best light for your photo.

I`m gonna add some of the shots to show you the advantages and also the disadvantages of these extention tubes.

That`s how you would see this coin on a fullframe sensor (24mmx36mm) by just using the 50mm lens without anything. Using an aperture of f/16 and ISO 100 I already had to set an exposure time of 4 sec.

Still at f/16 and ISO 100 but adding the 12mm extention tube you can see that I was able to get ways closer to the coin but also had to raise the exposure up to 8 sec.

That`s how you capture the coin on the sensor by using the 20mm tube, f/16, ISO 100 and 13 sec.

Now I put on the 30mm tube. As you can see, there is not that much difference between the 20mm and the 36mm, but that also is related to the used lens. The exposure only raised up to 15 sec.

For the last photo of the series I added all three tubes into one. That means the lens was extended up to 68mm from the sensor. That leads us to the biggest disadvantage of the tubes. By raising the distance you need more and more light. For the last photo 30 sec almost weren`t enough at all.

That means you always will need either some kind of flash like an external flashgun or a ringflash to get the best light on your object. If you haven`t any of them I`d recommend you to use at least a tripod and at least the timer mode to avoid camera shakes.

I hope this little review was kind of helpful until now and shows that you don`t necessarily need an expensive macro lens to get great results!