Macrophotography on the somewhat more expensive
I’d been saving up for a new bug-photographing camera for a while, because a good digital SLR has a lot of features that make it more useful for macrophotography than a standard point-and-shoot camera. Then in November of 2009, I was looking over the KEH Camera Brokers website, and realized that I could get a used Canon 10D SLR body for $240. This is about the price of a new point-and-shoot. For reference, the Canon 10D was a $2000 camera as recently as 2004. It was one of Canon’s second generation of digital SLRs, and its resolution was approximately equivalent to 35mm film. It also had the two features that I really wanted in a camera: (1) the ability to take interchangeable lenses, and (2) when you press the shutter button, it takes the picture now, not 3 seconds from now (after the bug has flown away or run off).
Of course, this was just the camera body, it didn’t come with a lens, macro or otherwise. I first tried using the lens from my old SLR camera, mounted backwards to give high magnification. This is a standard trick for getting high magnification without a dedicated macro lens. It sort of worked, but I found out that it had a lot of aberration and distortion everywhere except right in the middle of the field of view, and the depth-of-field was awful. I think this was a result of the aperture diaphragm no longer being engaged when the lens was backwards. As a result, the images came out not so good. So, it was looking like I would need to get an actual dedicated macro lens.
Right about this point, Sandy decided to do something very nice for me, and bought me a Canon 100mm Macro F/2.8 lens as a Christmas present. This is a very nice, very versatile lens: at closest focus, it can give 1:1 magnification, but it can also work as a portrait lens and a mild telephoto lens, so I can go from taking pictures of bugs to taking pictures of children to taking pictures of birds at a moment’s notice.
One nice feature is that this lens does not block the flash on the camera, so I can actually use the flash at high magnifications. This means I can hand-hold the camera, and take shots out in the field of insects in their natural habitats!
And, when I want really high magnification, I can still take my old Olympus lens, reverse it, and put it on the end of the Canon lens to look at tiny bugs that are less than a millimeter across! That requires using the microscope stand for a support, though. Or, I can just clip on the Raynox DCR-150 lens, which doesn’t give as much magnification but is easier to focus with.
One feature that it doesn’t have, and that I really miss, is the manual focusing aids that my old SLR had – a split-image focusing screen with a microprism ring. This was a device where, if the image was not in focus, there was a line across the image where features running across the screen did not line up, and a halo of blurriness due to the microprisms. When it was perfectly in focus, the image features would line up and the microprism blur would vanish. The modern digital SLRs have abandoned that, depending on autofocus. Which would be OK, except that autofocus doesn’t work very well in macrophotography, so I have to focus manually. Without the manual focusing aids. Boo! If there’s some way to retrofit an old-style manual focusing screen into a Canon 10D, I’m all ears.
Regarding the source of the used equipment, I’d had previous good experience buying used equipment from KEH. I’d bought my old film SLR camera (an Olympus OM-2) from them back in 1988. Even though it had been used before I bought it, it worked perfectly for me for almost 15 years. The only reason I stopped using it was because the camera store that used to develop my pictures went out of business, and it became difficult to find someplace competent to develop the film. So, I had reason to trust KEH to provide a quality product. I figure that anything that they grade as “EX+” is nearly as good as new. And, the fact that they’ve been around for decades meant that I wasn’t dealing with some fly-by-night outfit, or with some individual on Ebay who I might have no inherent reason to trust.