Shooting Macro With The A610

Hello,

I took some photos with my A610 recently, and was really impressed with just how close I could get to my subject with this little gem. In addition, with a 2.8 aperture, it has a very shallow depth of field. Here are some photos I took with it the other evening:

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A640 here, and I share your interest in macro imaging, sadly the main macro forum tends to lend itself mainly to morning dew on grass and insects. And while they do produce some stunning images in there - it all gets a little samey after a while. I like to macro anything from tiny screw threads to £10 note details, and I run a regular competition on my own forum based on guessing what the item is from it's macro image.

FYI, the furthest I have been able to push macro, is with a 58mm tube, 4x 10+ lenses then a stepdown to 52mm followed by a 4+ and a 2+ giving a total of 46+ macro. At this proximity to the object (ie: this is actually touching the lens) you need to zoom in to at least 4x optical to rid yourself of vignetting and C.Abbr. The DOF at this level is about 1mm so focus stacking is advised.

It never ceases to amaze me what modern compact cameras are capable off with the simple addition of a few cheap lenses. I look forward to seeing more from you soon and welcome to the board.

If you haven't looked at it yet, both of you might find the link on Canon A70 Super Macro interesting.

BBoi wrote in post #3020100
A640 here, and I share your interest in macro imaging, sadly the main macro forum tends to lend itself mainly to morning dew on grass and insects. And while they do produce some stunning images in there - it all gets a little samey after a while. I like to macro anything from tiny screw threads to £10 note details, and I run a regular competition on my own forum based on guessing what the item is from it's macro image.

FYI, the furthest I have been able to push macro, is with a 58mm tube, 4x 10+ lenses then a stepdown to 52mm followed by a 4+ and a 2+ giving a total of 46+ macro. At this proximity to the object (ie: this is actually touching the lens) you need to zoom in to at least 4x optical to rid yourself of vignetting and C.Abbr. The DOF at this level is about 1mm so focus stacking is advised.

It never ceases to amaze me what modern compact cameras are capable off with the simple addition of a few cheap lenses. I look forward to seeing more from you soon and welcome to the board.

How do you like the tikona telephoto lens? I've been looking for a tele for my a610. I've been looking at the raynox tele too....

The Raynox is better IMHO, but for £14, the Tokina is more than ample for my purposes and performs quite well. Optimal zoom though to get passed vignetting is 4, and to get by the slight edge blur, you could creep into the digital zoom by one notch.

Here's a pic I took today with it at 4x optical zoom, you will note the slight vignetting and c.abrr - plus i was mainly focussing on the clock face. This is a direct scale down from 3648 x 2736 to 800px wide, so you do lose detail and sharpness, but for the purposes of this you can see that 4x optical zoom isnt quite enough; it's ideal for 5x and over. I dont mind going to 6x zoom though as you get very little extra pixelation and I can clean that up easily enough anyway. With 10mpx at my disposal I can crop out what I dont need, so I dont mind the issues with this lens.

Also note: I was using an ND4, CPL and UV filter behind this which pushes it a short way further out than it would normally sit, by maybe ... 1cm, the setting sun is on the church wall, very beautiful.

Below that is a 100% crop of the clock face. I know I need to work on my skills too, only had the camera 4 months, I dare say in the hands of somone who knows what they are doing, this would have been a far better picture. Hope that helps.

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