{"id":1000845,"date":"2007-09-03T10:47:25","date_gmt":"2007-09-03T15:47:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/birding\/2007\/09\/03\/macros-and-diopters\/"},"modified":"2009-11-15T18:41:35","modified_gmt":"2009-11-15T23:41:35","slug":"macros-and-diopters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/photography\/2007\/09\/03\/macros-and-diopters\/","title":{"rendered":"Macros and Diopters"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img src='http:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/09\/flower.JPG' alt='Closeup of zinnia' width='640' height='541' \/><\/p>\n<p>For my insect photography, I&#8217;ve been reading a lot of books and web pages about closeup photography. They usually suggest three things:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Diopters, a.k.a closeup lenses<\/li>\n<li>Macro lenses<\/li>\n<li>Extension tubes<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I haven&#8217;t tried extension tubes yet, but I did buy myself a cheap set of macro and closeup lenses. However, I discovered that the directions were distinctly lacking. Furthermore, none of the books and web pages I consulted explained what these did or how to use them in words I could understand. So today I ran a few experiments to figure out just what they did and how to use them. Since flying insects in the park aren&#8217;t exactly a reproducible test case, I set up my tripod and took some pictures of a flower on my dining room table with different lenses. Here&#8217;s what I figured out:<br \/>\n<!--more--><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>A macro lens is a magnifying glass. Put one on your camera and you&#8217;ll get an image that&#8217;s twice (or three times or four times) as large, but you&#8217;ll only see half (or a third or a fourth) of the object.<\/li>\n<li>A closeup lens (diopter) does not change the size of the image. Putting a closeup lens on your camera without changing anything else (zoom or position) has no effect on the image. However, it does enable you to stand further back and use a higher zoom. For example, if I&#8217;m 20 centimeters away, my camera can only zoom in to maybe 2X. If I put a diopter on the front, then the camera, staying at the same position, can now zoom in to 4X-6X. This means I can stay where I am instead of moving in closer to the object I want to shoot. This is important if you&#8217;d rather be holding your camera a meter away from a wasp nest than five centimeters.  In other words, a closeup lens doesn&#8217;t change what you see (unlike a macro lens). It just lets you stand further back and still get the shot.\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Next step is figuring out exposures and histograms. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For my insect photography, I&#8217;ve been reading a lot of books and web pages about closeup photography. They usually suggest three things: Diopters, a.k.a closeup lenses Macro lenses Extension tubes I haven&#8217;t tried extension tubes yet, but I did buy myself a cheap set of macro and closeup lenses. However, I discovered that the directions [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[96],"tags":[410],"class_list":["post-1000845","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photography","tag-flash"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000845","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1000845"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000845\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1002818,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1000845\/revisions\/1002818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1000845"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1000845"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.elharo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1000845"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}