This morning I got a few shots of a 6" (15cm) mushroom in the front yard. I ended up using the Sigma 20/1.8 (at f/16) to get this shot to emphasize perspective: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ellarsee/6315553067/in/set-72157628060218820 (side lit with AF540 through a lumiquest fold up soft box)
Not that I have any budget right now, but are there any Pentax mount ultrawide (12mm or shorter) macro lenses? Yes, I know, putting the 20 on a film camera would get me quite a bit closer to an ultrawide macro. I suppose there's always the option of extension tubes on a fisheye. It seems to me that with modern technology, you could make an amazing camera for macro work. I'd spec it out: Sensor would probably be APS, but with various crop modes so you could use a shorter lens and get more depth of field. Although technically, you could always just crop in post processing. It would be EVIL because you generally don't need the responsiveness of an optical viewfinder and electronic would give several advantages: 1) Software could use the actual image on the sensor to set exposure, focus etc. 2) A tethered display would make setting up macro shots so much easier. 3) Design the lens mount system to report actual focus distance to the camera body. 4) Much shorter registration distance would allow for sharper, faster, wider wide angle lenses. 5) Electronic control of the focusing means you could have in camera control for bracketing focus for image stacking. 6) Multiple flash jacks for independent control of different flashes, from the body (or tethered laptop) in both manual and auto exposure modes. While I'm at it, throwing expensive features that would only appeal to a select few, lets mount the sensor with a high range of motion SR system, because many of these features (especially good tethering and image stacking) would also appeal to the astrophotography crowd. And if we were really crazy, some sort of a tilt capability on the sensor for architectural work, though it might also be useful for macro work. I suspect that the tilt sensor wouldn't really fly just due to the difficulty of guaranteeing that it was "perfectly straight" for normal shooting. -- Larry Colen [email protected] sent from i4est -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
