A Few Medium Format Macro Photos

Yesterday, I got to thinking about macro photos.  These close-up photos require some special equipment so I was wondering if I could patch something together to allow me to do some macro photography.

Back a couple of weeks ago, I did try adding a macro converter lens to the front end of a couple of my old Pentax 645 lenses.  That worked "okay" but I did need to crop the photos a bit to eliminate hard vignetting.  It worked but it wasn't ideal.

Yesterday, I remembered that one of the lenses I have been using on this Fuji GFX medium format camera is a Pentacon 50mm lens with a m42 mount.  The m42 mount is really just m42 threads.  It just so happens that I already use m42 fittings for my astronomy gear so I had a few m42 extension tubes on hand already.  Adding an extension tube allows me to get far closer to the object I'm photographing.  

Every lens has a minimum focus distance...  if you try to get closer than this minimum focus distance, then the lens won't be able to focus.  However, when you add an extension tube between the lens and the camera, you can get closer to your subject.  Since I had a lens with an m42 mount, I went to my astronomy gear to retrieve a few different lengths of extension tubes.  

For these photos below, I used my shortest extension tube...  around 8mm, if I remember correctly.  This short 8mm extension tube allowed me to get close enough to this watch that it allowed me fill the entire frame with the face of the watch.  This is roughly a 1:1 magnification ratio which means what I captured in a photo (the watch face) is the same size as the sensor in real life.  

When I looked closely at the photos of the watch while they were still on my camera, I was able to clearly see some water stains on the face of the watch.  At first, I thought maybe I hadn't cleaned the glass face enough so I cleaned it again...  shot another photo...  I was still seeing water stains!  

I picked up the watch to see if I could see where the stains were located...  I could not see any water stains.  When I looked at the watch face through a magnifying glass, however, I was finally able to see the water stains.  These stains are under the glass and on the face of the watch.  I was pretty amazed at the resolution of these images.  I was seeing things in the photos that I could not see with my naked eyes.  That's pretty impressive especially since I was seeing these faint water stains while the photos were still on the camera.  Seeing more detail on a desktop computer monitor wouldn't be unusual but seeing more detail on the camera than I can see with my naked eyes is impressive!

Now I was looking for something else to photograph.  I couldn't find anything all that interesting so I grabbed a pencil instead...  yes, rather boring but I was testing the use of extension tubes on this medium format camera.

I'm not sure how much macro photography I would do with a big medium format camera but I still liked the idea of trying it.  Ideally, I would prefer a dedicated macro lens and I do have one in mind but I'm in no rush to purchase it.  There are too many other things I would prefer to do with this new camera and that still involves finding two more lenses...  a fast portrait lens and an auto-focus lens that is small for walking around with this camera.  

In the meantime, I'm still being impressed by what this camera can produce.