Vintage camera reviews, repairs and photography blog
Today I want out with my Ricoh GXR Leica A12 camera, fitted with a Tamron 90mm Macro lens, to take some macro photos on a piece of waste ground at the bottom of our street. This is a fairly common occurrence at this time of year, when the weather is nice, but I found it a bit of a frustrating experience. Normally, I can set whichever camera I’m using to manual focus and use the focus peaking mode of the […]
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Today I’ve been out with a Tamron 90mm f/2.8 macro lens to see the Fuji X-T1 macro capability using this Pentax K mount lens. Fuji X-T1 macro sample pictures Because the lens was mounted on a Fuji X mount to Pentax K mount adapter I had to use manual focus and I used either aperture priority exposure mode, or manual mode with auto ISO. The metering was set to matrix or pattern metering in all cases. I found the easiest […]
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Over the last few weeks it’s become a bit of a habit to go into the garden at some point in the day with my camera to see if I can get any pictures of the insects and spiders which crawl and fly around the plants. Although neither my wife Janice or I are naturally gifted gardeners, we have been steadily improving the condition of the garden and introducing more plants and flowers in order to encourage more insects and […]
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I went into the garden this afternoon to get some macro pictures with my Tamron 90mm f/2.8 macro lens and Pentax K-5 DSLR. I’ve been using the K5 quite a bit over the last few weeks instead of my Nex 6, simply because I’m going to take it on holiday in a few weeks along with a couple of Pentax film cameras. When I put the pictures through post processing in Lightroom I was struck by how clean and well […]
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Dragonflies have alway been a problem for me to photograph, so I am particularly pleased that I managed to get quite close to a small golden dragonfly today when I had my specialist macro lens fitted to my Sony Nex 6. I’m not sure of the species, but I found this dragonfly sitting on the end of a stick which was acting as a stake for a small tree. Normally if I find a dragonfly sitting anywhere it will be […]
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It’s been a hot day here today and I’ve been out with my macro lens trying to get some interesting insect pictures. Although it is hot, almost as soon as I got to Priors wood (where I usually go to get insect pictures) the sun went in and the light levels dropped quite a lot. Although that didn’t make it in anyway impossible to take pictures, it meant about 3 stops less light, so most of these were taken at […]
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This morning I took my customary walk around the field near our house to see what insects I could find before the Sun warmed them to the point where I wouldn’t be able to catch them. I found quite a variety of insects as I walked around – butterflies, ladybirds and flies, and I also managed to get some pictures of the red mayflies which were darting about the pond in the corner of a children’s playground in Knebworth. I’ve […]
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I think one of the main reasons I like macro photography is because there are subjects everywhere you look. I went out this morning with my Sony Nex 6 and Tamron 90mm f/2.8 macro lens and I’d found these willing insects within a few minutes just in my garden. I took these pictures at about 8am, and that’s a good time to be out taking macro photos because the sun hasn’t fully warmed the insects up so they are still […]
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We have been away for a couple of days visiting my Sister in Norwich. I assumed that since she lives in a city the last thing I would need would be my macro kit so I only took my standard ‘takumar kit‘ with me. Unfortunately it turned out I was wrong as we went for a walk into the woods by her house and discovered there is a nature park next to the woods and a whole collection of small […]
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This is a picture I took at Dunwich National Trust nature reserve whilst we were completing a ‘Pirate treasure hunt’ with Emma. We had just completed a clue and this Peacock butterfly fluttered by and sat on the ground in front of me. Fortunately I had my Vivitar series one 70 – 210mm macro zoom fitted to the Nex 6 and I was able to fire off a couple of shots before he(she?) fluttered away. Although this picture isn’t in […]
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I know the orange tip butterfly is not a rare or endangered species, but I’ve seen them flutter by me for the last 4 or 5 years since I’ve been interested in macro photography and I’ve never been able to get a shot of one. That’s why I was particularly pleased when I finally managed to get a half decent shot this morning of an early specimen which fluttered by me. We had been out for a walk when I […]
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This is a short post showing the macro performance of a Takumar 55mm f/1.8 m42 lens when a 16mm extension tube is mounted behind the m42 to nex adapter. With this combination I was able to focus down to about 4 inches away from the objects shown in the pictures which I found around the house and garden. The majority of these shots were taken at F/1.8 to emphasise the shallow depth of field and I carried out my normal […]
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We have a lovely sunny day here in the UK and I went into the garden to see what wildlife was about. This tidy spider was hanging in his web on a tree and the sun light was directly behind him. I rushed inside before either he moved or the sun went behind a cloud and managed to take a few pictures using my Pentax K-5 and Tamron 90mm macro lens. This one is about the best I got at […]
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This post is about this classic telephoto zoom lens, a Vivitar Series 1 70 – 210 Macro Zoom, which I bought from eBay UK this week. This lens was made in several different versions over the years, and it’s generally accepted that the first three versions were the best in terms of sharpness and contrast. I picked my copy up from eBay for £50 which seems to be the going rate for a good clean example, and for that I […]
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I like macro photography, but this post uses a macro photograph to point out a Lightroom 5 post processing technique I’ve started to use a bit which is Radial Filters. This pretty unremarkably picture of a fly was taken a few weeks ago and I’d mostly forgotten about it. But I was looking through the pictures I’d taken and realised that I could improve this one if I could blur the flower a bit and bring the fly into more […]
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