Passiflora tenuiloba is a small, unassuming passiflora native to south and west Texas. I'm partial to them, and have several potted at home. One's been blooming for the past week, with flowers maybe 3/4 inch across.
I've played around with macro a little using a Nikon 50mm f/1.8 AI-s I inherited from my father-in-law with a reversing ring. I like the manual focus and aperture control which gives me more flexible say over the final image, but it's not tremendously powerful as far as macros go. Straight shots of the tenuiloba flower weren't particularly impressive. Then I remembered that my brother'd given me a Vivitar 2x teleconverter a while back that he'd played around with but lost interest in. Could I use it for macro? First attempts resulted in error messages from my camera--the lens wasn't communicating with it, the camera said, and recommended I clean the contacts. The Vivitar had autofocus contacts on it, and somehow these were causing problems. Solution? I taped over them. Presto! No more error message. And wow, were the results striking--I've lost two stops on the lens, but fortunately it was a fast f/1.8 to begin with. I'm happy with the results, and hope to take the assembly out tomorrow and see what I can find.
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