Have You Tried A Reversing Ring

So I love looking at macro shots. Being that I happen to have a camera and also love taking photos I thought I'd give macro a try myself. A dedicated macro lens can be had but usually at a significant cost. There are some older lens floating around one of the auction sites that can get you into a macro lens for around $200 but that's still a large chunk of change for me to drop on something I'm not sure about yet.

I came across "lens reversing" on a Flickr forum dedicated to macro photography using this type of set up. It's budget friendly and lets you play around some. There are a few snags that I'm still working through and if there's any interest in this I will update in the next couple weeks.

What I've found so far is this. There are rings you can purchase from those online auction sites that will allow you to mount a lens backward on your camera body using the lenses filter threads. I picked one up for $5. It's solid metal and fits the camera body without any slop or fudging. The threaded side is a fixed size. In my case it's 49mm to fit the 50mm lens from my newly acquired Praktica film camera. The film camera was $15 at the local Goodwill. So now I also have a great tool to play with to work on thinking about exposure before snapping. Trying to make exposure more of an intuitive process. But I digress. I'm into my macro experiment for $20 at this point and learned a pretty good lesson. When you reverse the lens you no longer have aperture control so you need a lens with an aperture ring to control aperture. The aperture has really no noticeable effect on DOF it's used more for controlling light. You also have no auto focus and this part gets tricky. The area of the reversed lens that your camera will see to capture the photo is the front element. In the case of my 50mm, there is some curvature to the front element. This results in a very, very small area of focus. I actually measured it to be about 7mm. That's not just front to back either, that's also side to side. I'm almost positive it's because of the curvature of the front element. I also had to be about 5-6" (13-15cm) from the subject to get that into focus. Handheld would be impossible. Camera needs to be on a tripod and either tripod or subject need to be moved to assist focus.

What I want to try is a longer focal length lens with a flatter front element. None of my current lenses have a 49mm filter thread. I'm looking for a fixed length long lens at a reasonable price to test my theory and hopefully get some shots worth posting. If you're interested or have any input, please jump in.

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