Macro Salt Shaker
This weekend has been busy in a number of ways. One of them has been fitting in time to try out an incredible lens that I rented – the Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro. This lens only takes macro shots, it does not focus to infinity, and its depth of field is so narrow you have to wonder if it focusses at all. I did read up on it before renting it so had some idea what to expect. This is a typical review – the review has a tone of awe about it, it is such a quirky, narrow-use and yet magnificent lens. And I have to agree. It is so hard to use that all I have done so far is try to master its technical challenges, I have been so distracted that I have not thought much about composition or making more interesting pictures with it. Though, if you are taking a picture of a flower bud and can see the cellular structure, that is interesting all by itself, to me.
The review I linked to above outlines the technical difficulties nicely – you move the camera or subject to focus it, or zoom in and out changing the magnification to get it in focus (in magnified live view is best), it has an extremely narrow depth of field, is heavy, needs to be so close to the subject it blocks the light, and so on. It is like attaching a microscope to the front of the camera. But, it does open up a new view on the world through the camera, and that is interesting and challenging and worth some extra work.
These photos are taken at 1:1 and 5:1 magnifications respectively. The images are not cropped, nor sharpened (though they have lost a bit of clarity in compressing them for the web). I did adjust contrast a bit. Lighting is from a window, with reflected light from a foil covered card for some of them. I was going for depth of field rather than sharpness – the latter would have been better achieved around f-5.6 to f-8. I will post a few more over the next few days, but really I have had few successful shots due to the learning curve for this lens. I think I will rent it again sometime – it would be interesting to use it with a flash, maybe a ring flash. But I don’t have a flash so that is out for now. The place I rented it from (Camera Traders) also does not have the right kind of flash at this time, and in any case adding dollars to the rental cost would very soon make it seem an overly expensive bit of fooling around. This way it was pretty much the same as going out to the movies – since it is a weekend I had 3 days to play for the price of one day.
I should also acknowledge that I saw a macro shot of salt grains on a salt shaker top a few weeks ago, and thought it was such a good idea for exploring this lens that I shamefully stole the concept. Worse yet, I can’t recall the blog I saw it on, so cannot give credit where it’s due. If it is your post, pipe up below, with a link. I would appreciate that.
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Canon 5Dii, Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x Macro Lens, ISO200. Top: f-16, 1/3 second, 5x. Middle: f-16, 1/5 second, 1x. Bottom f-9, 1/3 second, 5x.
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burnt embers 
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Wow, talk about a razor-sharp depth of focus there, my friend! It looks to me like that baby is good for the depth of…. one grain of salt! LOL I love stuff like this. Your story reminds me of when I first got my 50mm prime and started playing with it around the f/1.4 area and realized the you could cut yourself on that depth of focus. Great work, my friend, I can’t wait to see what comes out next!
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Ha! Great comment. That is pretty much it, DoF = one grain of salt. Limiting in so many ways, not least of which is the danger of cuts 🙂 Thanks for coming by and commenting 🙂
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Amazing. Like this shot..
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Thanks so much!
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Wow! This is stunning. What a fun toy to play with for the whole weekend. And, even if these are the only shots you got, it was worth it. The first image is awesome – the crystals and fine lines look amazing. The second image is cool. But the third image – that I love. The focus on the middle ground salt crystals is superb. Their detail is amazing. The whole image works, because this mini-landscape fades in all directions. I love it.
Ken is right, we’re money no object…
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Hi Ryan. The mini-landscape idea is fun. I tried to make something else like one, but could not get it to work – too much to learn right now. And man, the amount of dust in my environment. I am shooting against black glass this morning, and even though I clean it frequently, when I look at a 5x image, I quail before the amount I am going to be using the clone tool on some of these pictures.
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Hahahaha! Oh dust. No matter where you live, it just seems to collect.
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Yeah – clone tools are so darned useful.
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🙂
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Like the other guy said, I had no idea grains of salt were square until now. That’s one heck of a lens. Great shots!
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Hi Denzil – welcome to my blog – it’s really nice to have you come by. It is one heck of a lens. I am having a good time with it. I have to return it tomorrow. Unfortunately the light today is quite dark and overcast which limits some of my ideas about how to use it.
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If money was no object, I’d buy this lens in a heartbeat. You have demonstrated it’s capabilities well with the grains of salt. You can get some terrific shots with this but it looks like it takes a bit of discipline to use it to it’s full advantage.
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Hi Ken – discipline is the word I think. I can’t quite imagine how one gets images of insects or other moving subjects with this lens – a flash I suppose goes a long way to immobilising them. But how do you know when they are in focus? How do you get them in front of the lens? I think there must be a lot of tricks that one has to learn to get the most out of this lens. If money were not object…. yeah, me too. What a blast it would be. On the other hand, $25+tax for 3 days of use is not too bad.
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awesome lens! Am I the only person in the world who didn’t even know that salt crystals were cubical?
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Hi geomack – I think not – others are already weighing in with same comment. I think I knew already – some distant memory from a high school science class, or maybe fooling around with a binocular microscope years ago, or something. But, I did not have an image of them firmly planted in my mind, not till now anyway.
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This is awesome. I really love how the salt grains are like little ice cubes.
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Hi Matt – welcome to my blog and thanks for commenting. Glad you like these shots.
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