Reader's Comments - Index of - Free

Lens
Phil has given a very nice summary of options, with one exception. No doubt humility motivated him to
omit the best resource for obtaining that perfect lens: used equipment listed in Photo.net classifieds.
Unlike ebay or other general auction sites, we users of photo.net feel comfortable that most sellers of
equipment are other serious, or at least honest, photographers. Consider how much faith is required to
hand over thousands of dollars to a total stranger, based on his or her assertion that the equipment is both
on its way, and in working order.
Over the years, I have purchased many cameras and lenses from photo.net, and have been very pleased
with the process. For the non-rich among us, it's a great way to eat AND take pictures.
-- David Merfeld, December 13, 2001
Phil, you say "As far as I know, Canon is the only company in the world that makes a lens intended for
convenient photography of objects smaller than a 35mm frame. See the photo.net review of the Canon
MP-E 65mm 1X-5X macro lens." Well, you're wrong. Olympus makes several 20mm and 38mm macro
lenses. You can put them on bellows and a focusing stage for control and cover from 1.8x to 12.4x. But
for convenience, you can also put them on the telescopic auto tube (65-116mm). Then the 38mm covers
1:2.5-4x and the 20mm covers 1:5.8x to 8.3x. Handholdable? Well, I'd use an electronic flash to keep
things still and blast enough light to get thru such an extension (even if one of the 20's is f/2).
And the auto tube can be used to extend the close-up focusing of any Olympus or 3rd party lens, from
16mm to 1000mm. For example, the 50/2 (or 50/3.5) macro would focus down to about 1:4x But the
shorter macro lenses are better corrected for their macro ratios.
Tom
-- tOM Trottier, May 29, 2002
A crop of the center of a frame taken with a 14 mm lens may have the same field of view as a 100 mm
portrait lens, but will have a very different (larger) depth of field and presumably a different rendering of
out of focus area. Thus a 100 mm portrait lens would be useful even in a world of perfect lenses and
film.
-- Peter Langfelder, June 7, 2002
Another common option is the 50mm macro lens.
Two things to be aware of are (a) macro lenses aren't as fast as non-macro normal lenses, and (b)
because so much of the focus ring is taken up to focus at macro distances, there's not much rotation left
to focus at non-macro distances. As an example, my Sigma 50:2.8 EX macro lens has a whopping half a
centimeter between its 5 foot setting and its infinity setting. That makes accurate manual focusing a very
http://www.photo.net/making-photographs/lens (8 of 9)7/3/2005 2:22:04 AM