Macro Photography - Lens Inverter Ring

I had an excuse to have a go at some more macro photography recently and jumped at the chance as the last time out I didn't get to grasp with the inverter ring I bought for my, then, Nikon D3100. Since then I've upgraded to the Nikon D90 and the change and improvement is very noticeable so I was keen to try it out. 


Here's an example of one of the better captures of my first outing which I wasn't very inspired by, haha.

Improving on this would be helped (or at least I thought would be helped) by the subject matter this time... ice! Or at least ice crystals.


As it turns out, ice is a damn nightmare to photograph and I got very very cold lying on grass, photographing frozen tennis balls and even some of the ice crystal formations on the car cover to one of my cars. One of the challenges is getting the exposure right, but to start with lets look at some of the settings.


Here's the setup we used.

Here's the Nikon D90, the BR-2A Nikon Lens inverter ring, and a Nikon 35-70mm f3-4.5 which I picked up ridiculously cheaply (£10) a while ago. The lens thread is 52mm which is important as that's the thread on the inverter ring.


Once the lens is mounted back to front on the camera body there are a few things you should set before you start shooting. 


Firstly, the shorter the lens focal length, the more magnification you're going to get. So in my case – 35-70mm - I dialed it right in to 35mm for higher magnification. 


Secondly the aperture. Obviously, the camera usually sets the aperture value for you (or at least the aperture ring if it's a manual selection) but seeing as the lens is on back to front the aperture selection lever is not engaged. I made a small rubber pin to hold the lever out. If you open the aperture right up, though, the already tiny depth of field will be absolutely minute. And I mean minute. Maybe a millimetre or two. And that makes focusing a nightmare. Mine was held out at about halfway, so around f8.


The downside to this is the exposure is going to be badly affected, so that meant the ISO went up to 800 or so and the shutter speed down as far as I could go.


My first few photographs didn't go very well. Focus was too tough.

Using a tripod was just too difficult as you pretty much have to focus by moving in and out from your subject. A monopod may work better as it provides a little more movement but even still, I'm not sure of it's ease of use.


Eventually with a little patience (ok, a lot of patience) I was beginning to get somewhere. 

One of the biggest tips I can give is to try to get the form you're capturing to run along the plane of focus, at least a little, or the photograph ends up with a selective focus point being tiny and throwing most of the rest of the photo into bokeh.


This is what happened when I tried to capture the frozen tennis ball. As it's round it was tough to get the ice to be along the same focal plane and some of the photos had such a small focus point it was laughable. Here is one of the better ones though.

One of my favourite photos of the day.


If you want to have a look at some of the other photographs and see more about what I did please check out the video below to see in more detail the processing that went into the photographs too.

All in all I was very pleased at how the macro side of things went and I'm sure I made a step forward from the last time I tried it which, after all, is what we're all after. Improving each time we pick up our cameras. Next time, I'll look a little more into improving my processing and trying to develop a style which I'm happy with and can repeat from photograph to photograph.


Thanks guys! I hope this is of interest to you and you get something out of it. Any questions or comments please feel free to ask them here or on youTube and I'll see you all anon.


Chris