Advice for macro beginner?

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I am looking to get into the world of macro/close up photography as it is something that interests me plus is easily accessible as I seem to have quite a lot of small creatures visiting the garden that I could snap.

What I am looking for is what is the best way to start out? Extension tubes? or buying a dedicated macro lens? If going for a lens I would probably by second hand off here or from a used dealer.

Camera by the way is a Nikon D7000 and my current lenses are on my profile.
 
Extension tubes have the benefit of being the cheapest and do not introduce any degradation into the image.
 
Second hand lens will be your best bet
A proper macro will give you a 1:1 scale which your looking for.
Filters look dung, tubes never tried them, just something extra to carry

A nice 105mm will work great
 
I'd get a feel for it by playing around with a lens attached the wrong way round. This is a bit cumbersome if a proper adaptor is not used but it does provide a feel for the sort of photos to expect. I've not tried extension tubes so can't really comment on how they perform but in terms of a macro lens, you'd ideally get one as long as you can afford (105mm or 200mm) to stand a good chance of getting close to a small creature in the garden. To get 1:1 on a 40 or 60mm requires being only a few inches away. Budget is obviously the key issue here as always! Best option is a good long micro lens, free/cheap option is buying an adaptor ring for your exisiting lens. The reversed lenses work best when an aperture ring is present though. Another thing to bare in mind when doing micro photography is the depth of field which is always extremely small! So a decent micro lens will work well at smaller apertures than you'd normally use. Alternatively you can use a tripod and take multiple shots at slightly differnt focusses and blend them together in post processing.
 
The really cheapest way to try macro is a set of close up filters off Ebay - these usually come in 4 different strengths for about £10-15.

They are used just like filters and screw onto the front of your lens - but for best results should be used with lenses with small filter sizes - so a kit lens is ideal.

Quality is variable with them but they will give you a taste of the joys - and drawbacks (!) of macro photography.

But be prepared for a lot of dud pics - you need good lighting and a fairly fast shutter speed and the DOF is very small so you will find that in a lot of pics the focus is in the wrong place.

Even now I count myself lucky if I get 50% keepers - and usually it's a lot less then that!

But if you find yourself hooked then the next step would be a set of automatic extension tubes (Amazon sell Polaroid auto tubes for about £60.00 new) and again with your kit lens you can get excellent results with them.

So good luck with your pics.

.
 
Cheap and easy way of getting into macro is with a Raynox DCR-250 macro adapter. Only £40 (Amazon) and far better quality than those e-bay cheapies, even though they're similar in theory. Raynox is a coated triplet design, not an uncoated single diopter. Works well with anything over about 50mm. Have a look at a few images I prepared earlier, only 25,000 of them :D http://www.flickr.com/groups/raynoxdcr250/

BTW, extension tubes do reduce image quality (because they move the lens so far away from its optimised operating range) and are not the same standard as a pukka macro. Though with popular macro subjects like bugs and beetles you may never notice it.
 
HoppyUK said:
BTW, extension tubes do reduce image quality (because they move the lens so far away from its optimised operating range) and are not the same standard as a pukka macro. Though with popular macro subjects like bugs and beetles you may never notice it.
Click to expand...

In fact you'll never notice it at all unless you like photographing test charts etc.

And another excellent reason for buying them is that you can use them on virtually any lens with no discernible loss of quality even on zoom lenses:

http://www.talkphotography.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=343104

http://www.talkphotography.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=313888

http://www.talkphotography.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=344817

And some here showing how good it is when coupled with the 50mm f1.8:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/20926615@N05/sets/72157625975281497/

For macro I regard extension tubes as a vital part of my equipment.

.
 
Mystery57 said:
How do the Raynox's work - as a newbie not heard of one of these before reading this thread
Click to expand...

The Raynox DRC-250 (and also the less powerful DCR-150) is basically a supplementary close-up lens. Sometimes known as a close-up filter (though it's not, because it doesn't filter anything) or diopters - which is the measure of the strength, eg +1, +3 etc. DCR-250 is very powerful at +8 diopters, allowing you to go very close. They work on the same principle as reading glasses and simply screw on to the front of the lens like a filter.

They do reduce image quality, and the stronger ones reduce it more. Edge sharpness suffers particularly, and it can be very noticeable at low f/numbers. You also get field curvature and distortion.

That doesn't sound very good, but in practise it's often not a problem with most macro subjects because you have to stop down to a higher f/number to get sufficient depth of field and most macro subjects are around the centre of the image so the edges don't matter much and they'll most likely be out of focus anyway.

If you shoot critical macro subjects, like coins or stamps, you'll be wanting a pukka macro that will keep the corners sharp, at low f/numbers, and keep square things square and round objects round. But otherwise, you may be hard pressed to see much difference :) See all those great images on the Flickr link I posted above.

FWIW I sold two macro lenses and now use tubes on a 70-200 zoom. The extra focal length and flexibility of the zoom are very handy and they work very well for me, but I'm not that seriously into macro - more flowers and butterflies than beetle portraits. The closer you go, the harder and more critical it gets.
 
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