Macro

Yesterday our student was interested in the macro aspect of photography so I took along my extension tubes to show her the difference they could make in magnification, to an ordinary lens, At around £15 they would give her a chance to experiment to see if she was keen enough before spending a lot of money on a dedicated macro lens.

I hadn't used mine in ages so today I screwed all the sections together for maximum effect and fitted it between the camera and my 17 - 40mm lens. This uncropped image is the result.

The Extras show the image size I got with that lens on its own and a cropped version of that image. Although the cropped image has more detail, the reason for using the extension tubes is that this blipped image could be printed very large whereas the tiny cropped portion of the other image couldn't be. 

I know I've pushed this to extreme limits to make the point but it actually makes the best impact on a flat subject like a coin to avoid loss of detail in the shallow depth of field.