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cbraga•

This is WAY too blurry. Shutter speed seems fast enough so maybe it's the lens?

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HomelessGuyOP•

It is the lens, this was a 50mm f/1.8 reversed, with no reversing ring. I just held the lens up to the body by hand. I knew it would be blurry, but i still like the way it came out. Its supposed to be more abstract than anything.

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viamoi•

This is a tough one... and I hope you take my words with thought.

First off, this is not the result you are looking for, and we both know it. But, you're on the right track. The reversal ring is something else along the same lines and something I would steer you towards with you camera macro experiments. I cut out the plastic body cap that came with the camera exactly to fit my 50mm perfectly snug for testing. A little bit of super strong epoxy and a scratched filter I can knock the glass out of will work perfectly for a lens mount and a reversed 550mm, for cheap. Here's the major problem.... no more Aperture.
Have you tried using the 50mm on a macro lens just by holding it up for now? Increase you Aperture to something in the f/22 area and shoot with a lot of light. No Light? Pop-up flash with a toothpaste box as a tunnel to a flap with foil on it can be enough to get a hot flash to the subject while getting in close. Once you wrap your mind around that, you can build a much more stable Lightchute (my name for it) and if you're using a bigger external flash.... Kraft dinner box with same flap concept. Check out some of my stuff, I saw you are on Flickr. -ViaMoi on Flickr-

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HomelessGuyOP•

Thanks viamoi, did you wright a reversing ring tutorial on another site? I think i saw it. Good tips though, and I am right now looking for a reversing ring for my 70-200 f/4-50mm f/1.8. do you think the best way would be to buy a 52-72mm step up ring, and then a 52mm reversal ring? Im having a hard time finding a 52-72mm reversal.

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drfrogsplat•

I'd be interested to see how well that worked. I'm not entirely sure of the geometry, but I found with my 50mm f/1.8 reversed on my 55-250mm, there was serious 'vignetting' (more like complete occlusion on the sides of the frame) from the 50mm lens. I don't know if the 50mm f/1.4 or 1.2 would be wider and give better results, but for me, below 200mm I was losing a lot of my frame.

See these images for what I'm talking about:

From one to the next, the zoom of the 'forward facing' lens reduces from 250mm to 18mm (i swapped to the 18-55 for the last one).

My guess is this is dependant on the diameter of the 50mm to some extent, so a 50mm f/1.4 or f/1.2 (or even lower if you can find one) may be more effective.

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HomelessGuyOP•

I was definately expecting some vignetting, since the 70-200 is so much larger than the 50. Maby i should try attaching my 28-135 to the 70-200. That would be a 72mm-77mm

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drfrogsplat•

I like the light chute idea. I'll definitely try that out...

I got a 58-52mm reverse adaptor (aka macro coupler) off ebay and played around with my 50mm attached (in reverse) to the front of my 55-250mm.

I suffered from the same issue with extremely small DOF, even with the 55-250 set to f/32 (perhaps the 50mm aperture needs to be changed also?).

The set-up is here:

And some examples here:

Incidentally, I've been told (i've yet to actually try this) that you can fix the aperture of the lenses (at least on Canon) by having the lens attached normally to the camera, pressing the aperture preview button (next to the base of the lens) and removing the lens or powering off the camera (alas, I don't have mine with me to test this right now though). That would let you use the 50mm in reverse with whatever aperture you wanted...

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