What a bargain!

[Mickymacro]

A cheap plastic 100mm Vivitar 3.5 macro brand new out the box for £60. Plastic may put some folks off but the lens resolution is on a par with stuff 10x the cost. I am like dog with two (ahems) at the moment! Wandered around the back garden yesterday and got these! Someone said I could use extension tubes...

[DaveW]

Probably the one made by Cosina because they own the Vivitar brand name now. See this Nikonians review of the lens under one of it's other names:-

http://www.nikonians.org/html/resources ... f35-1.html

Anyway not many lenses don't have some plastic in them now certainly some Nikon ones do and probably Canon also.

DaveW

[Mickymacro]

Thanks for that. I do use it on a Nikon DSLR by the way...and just getting used to manual exposure once again....any suggestions?
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[Danny]

Thanks for that. I do use it on a Nikon DSLR by the way...and just getting used to manual exposure once again....any suggestions?

Just post them in the macro forum Ask the same question and you should get some good responses. Need to watch the glare and reflections for the sun in this one.

BTW, I use a $2 magnifying glass sometimes with good results.

Danny.

[dougsmit]

Need to watch the glare and reflections for the sun in this one.
Danny.

Please excuse a new person resurrecting an old thread but your comment above suggests there is an obvious answer to a problem that troubles me greatly. How do I "watch the glare and reflections" from sun or flash when shooting glossy surface insects like Ladybugs or Japanese Beetles? I am not talking studio controlled light where I could build a tent or mini ball diffuser but shooting outside in bright sun or with flash to capture wild and free specimens. I have piles of reasonably decent otherwise images ruined by a bright flashback glare.
Example: http://www.pbase.com/dougsmit/image/81143898

To make this post slightly more on topic: Another source of really cheap macro lenses is the used bin. I get ocassional service from lenses left over from film days adapted to my Canon (which even retains auto exposure metering). Just about anything can be adapted but easiest are the old M42 screw mount lenses. As the OP noted, macro lenses are a breed where even the cheap ones can be worth using. I'm not saying they are as good as the 2007 models from the big name companies but there are a lot of budget entries into macro lurking in used bins because the latest bodies from that company has switched to electronic coupling and the old stuff will be missing a feature (or three). The point is that one is not completely locked out of fun-grade macro by the inability to spend big money on equipment.

[DaveW]

Apart from coupling to the electronics, many old lenses may be optically better than their modern counterparts. My old f3.5, 55mm Micro Nikkor I used for 35 years is often said to be equal to, or better, than it's modern f2.8D, 60mm AF Micro Nikkor counterpart, which I now have.

The old non-auto focus macro lenses usually just focused by extension rather than using all these floating elements brought in for auto focus so the motors did not have so much weight to move.

The simple solution to lens design was usually the best.

DaveW

[georgedingwall]

Need to watch the glare and reflections for the sun in this one.
Danny.

Please excuse a new person resurrecting an old thread but your comment above suggests there is an obvious answer to a problem that troubles me greatly. How do I "watch the glare and reflections" from sun or flash.

Hi Doug,

You can certainly use a flash diffuser outdoors, and there are many small handheld portable diffusers that you could use to help reduce glare from the sun. You could even use your body, a hat or some other object to prevent the sun shining directly onto your subject.

Using the flash off camera, either remotely or with a cable, can also help by changing the angle of the light so that you do not get as much reflection back to the camera.

You may also find that a polariser would help to reduce the suns glare a bit.

You might also consider that shooting in very bright sunlight probably isn't the best technique. I find that early in the morning and late in the day are the best times to shoot live subjects. The light is less harsh at those times.

If you shoot in RAW, you also have the ability to protect your highlights a bit. As long as you don't blow the highlights out completely, you can use your raw processor to balance the shadows and highlights better than you can in camera.

Good luck, bye for now.

[rjlittlefield]

A polarizer on the camera can help a lot against any one light source, like the sun or a single overwhelming flash. Its effectiveness depends on the angle of reflection -- best for glancing light, not much at all for light coming from nearly straight behind the camera. You'll have to compromise if there are two or more light sources, also.

With flash, there's a crossed-polarizer technique that can be devilishly effective, though it's a bit tricky to set up. See this topic by Tom Webster in the old forums, and this article by Wil Hershberger at NatureScapes. I can only recall using it once myself, to shoot some watery muck in a studio situation (here). The other guys seem to be using it in the field.

As noted above, diffusing the flash almost always helps, even if it's something as simple as a white handkerchief wrapped around the flashhead. There's a recent example here. Crossed polarizers and diffusers do not play well together, so you'll have to pick one or the other. A single polarizer on the camera may still help, even with a diffused flash.

In some cases, changing the angle of view just a little bit will help a lot. In the image above, all of the worst glare on the wings comes from flat faces that are tipped just so to reflect the sun. Shooting from a smidge higher or lower might have found a place where there weren't any of those big glares. Of course searching for that place takes time, which might have meant losing the shot altogether.

There's a lot of personal taste involved in all this. If you take away all the glare, the impression of "shiny" may go too.

For the image in this topic, I'm not very bothered by the glare -- it just says "Ah, shiny wings in bright sun".

Blown out flashback in every shot tells a different story though, and for that I'd recommend starting first by diffusing the flash and moving it farther off-axis.

--Rik