Finally got around to buying an Extension Tube for my camera. An Extension Tube is pretty much a way to do macro shots with your existing lenses. You attach it to the camera like a normal lens, but the tube is really just that, a gapping hole with the bayonet connection on its end, connect the normal lens to that, mounting the lens further from the sensor, which somehow brings the focus length closer.

Here’s the photo thursday taken with it, a strange miniature figurine. Scary.

I’ve been wanting the Olympus EX-25 for yonks and only just got around to nabbing one. Most of the fun with it isn’t with the images but the bonkers-ness. There are many trade-offs to using an extension tube rather than forking out for a dedicated Macro Lens. You lose Auto-Focus, which is understandable because I doubt the camera would be able to cope with how freaking sensitive the focusing is with this thing on. Just spinning the focus ring what must be a nano-metre goes right through unfocused to focused and back to un-focused so much you can’t even tell what it is! It also requires massive amounts of light, with this thing on the DoF is incredibly shallow, you need to crank up the F.Stop to the max (to the smallest aperture).  Couple that with the loss of light inherent in the extension tube and even in daylight you may end up with just a photo of black.  Therefore I’ve found I need the big ol flash gun mounted at all times.

Another thing that is really difficult to get your head around is what the zoom ring does, it kinda seems inverted somehow. For instance at say 100mm you can be a distance from the object that you might expect from the macro mode of a compact camera. At say 30mm you can get so close to the object that you risk bashing the glass of your lens into it, at 14mm (the widest my standard lens goes) you can’t get close enough, the object would have to somehow merge into the lens like some strange atomic gloop.

Here, is the box to an xbox game, I’ve taken the box with a lens without the extension tube so you can see the whole thing. And then I’ve take it with the tube attach to show how close you can get. Pretty close eh?