Yellow Jacket

Kevin Childress · Post by **Kevin Childress** » Tue Aug 18, 2015 6:51 am

Greetings from a forum newbie. I'm sharing this image primarily to link into a forum discussion related to reversed-lens photography that involves techniques for stopping down the reversed lens versus the main lens.

This image is typical of my projects where I use the Nikon AF-S DX Macro 85mm f/3.5 as the main lens and the Nikon 50mm AF-S f/1.8 as the reversed lens. This image was shot with the main lens stopped down to f/16 and with the reversed lens wide open.

Nikon D800 ~ ISO100 ~ focused-stacked from 46 1-second exposures with lens/camera adjusted in 0.10mm increments. One continuous 5,000k light illuminating the background and the rear of the subject, and one off-camera speedlight directly on the subject.

bobfriedman · Post by **bobfriedman** » Thu Aug 20, 2015 3:02 am

pretty nice at 1.8X and f/16... is it possible to shoot with both lenses wide open without vignetting?....

Kevin Childress · Post by **Kevin Childress** » Thu Aug 20, 2015 3:27 am

bobfriedman wrote:... is it possible to shoot with both lenses wide open without vignetting?....

Thank you, Bob. And truthfully I don't know the answer - I've never tried with both lenses wide open. I've never felt that I've had particular issues with vignetting using this lens combination. What vignette you see here was added in post.

bobfriedman · Post by **bobfriedman** » Thu Aug 20, 2015 3:57 am

i was mistaken it is the other way around... since you are at f/16 without vignetting in the viewfinder (unless you are cropping it out of the image) you should be able to shoot wide open with the main lens and get sharper images since there will be less diffraction effects.

Kevin Childress · Post by **Kevin Childress** » Thu Aug 20, 2015 4:30 am

bobfriedman wrote:... you should be able to shoot wide open with the main lens and get sharper images since there will be less diffraction effects.

I had only tried once in the past to shoot the main lens wide open with the reversed lens stopped down. Problem was I had no way to 'precisely' measure/control the f/stop of the front lens and the results were terrible. I actually am on my way to being able to fix that however. This afternoon I should receive a gadget to help me better control the reversed lens aperture. I'm looking forward to it!