DSLR and ancient macro lens

[Torbjørn]

I started photographing just a couple of months ago, and found macro photography to be both interesting and fascinating. Bought a used Niok D3300 and since I couldn't afford a macro lens younger than myself I ended up buying a Nikon Micro-NIKKOR 55mm f/3.5 from 1969. :-D I use this with both extension tubes and a bellow. There has been a lot of experimenting and mumbling over unknown words like ISO, f-stop, DOF and many other words that at first gave no meaning. I know what some of them mean now. :-P

But as a new photographer I'm very unsure about the results I'm getting, so here are some examples from a walk i the local botanical garden yesterday. Great weather but a bit windy. Most of the flowers were unwilling to keep still and in the frame for more than a few milliseconds. :-D Please give me some feedback, tips, critique and advice.

[Bent Hjarbo]

I am sure will give you a lot of tips, to me it looks as if you have done this for years

[Jack Dahlgren]

Looks like you are getting the basics right. Just keep working at it.
Several people in this group do advance techniques such as stacking multiple images to obtain extreme depth of field and you can learn a lot from them.

One thing to consider about macro photography is the subject matter and what you are trying to show.
For some people it is a technical exercise. Others are wanting to illustrate something beyond what the naked eye can see. I struggle to find a reason to do very much of this sort of work. 

[beryllium10]

Well done.  I agree with Bent and Jack, you've mastered the technical aspects and it's impressive to see a beginning photographer working so successfully with bellows and extension tubes.  Of these I particularly like the 2nd for the complementary colours and the 5th for subject and composition. One thing to think about, especially as magnification goes up, is getting more light on the flower to increase contrast and saturate the colours.  This is generally difficult at high magnification, but more so with a short lens like the 55mm - working distance is short to begin with, and gets less as you extend it, so the front of the lens can crowd out the light.  Flash or LED lighting can help, but is easier to set up and control indoors than out.  Backlighting can give some nice results.  Otherwise some old manual-focus telephotos, whether designed with macro ability or not, can be extended successfully and give a bit more working distance. Many can be found cheaply second-hand.  Bjørn's lens evaluation pages have been very helpful to me in finding out about such lenses (http://www.naturfotograf.com/lens_surv.html#rating).

Cheers,  John

[Akira]

Hi, Torbjørn, welcome to NG!

As others said, I would say that your learning curve is very steep!  All images are either stunning or pleasing.  As you say, a couple of them are ever-so-slightly blurred, unfortunately, but then the wind is to blame.

Thank you for sharing!

[timh]

Very nice images.

I particularly like the second one - interesting angle. Colors are very good too.

[Torbjørn]

Thank you all very much! I'm humbled by your kind words. Light is something I have on my list to work more with, a ring flash or some other type of macro flash is high on my want list. When I mount all 150mm's of extension tubes the lens does cast a big shadow. So far I've been experiment with light from my cellphone and a selfmade softbox, but specially the softbox is a bit difficult to drag around outside. :-/

[Patrick Berg-Pedersen]

I can see you struggling to get the object in proper focus, the first image is the sharpest, but the 3 next ones I don’t find focus. Most likely due to to much camera shake as you have used some kind of converter to get closer. The 55 3.5 MF AI-S is in fact one of my favorite lenses and it’s really great and sharp! Also great for IR use!

[armando_m]

Macro photography is challenging and I think you are doing well