Well now, how about searching for a little on-topic balance here!
I have the 20/3.5 - it was going cheap, was in mint condition, and who can
resist a bargain?
As a macro lens it does precisely what it is designed to do - 4x to 12x life
size - with the limitations inherent, lack of illumination, lack of depth of
field, lack of working distance to subject. Not what you want for shooting
live insects!
I was looking again at Bjørn Rørslett's fascinating site (very much worth
looking at), and found what he does with this type of macro lens, to
completely avoid the limitations:
http://www.naturfotograf.com/roll_your_own_lens.html
I mounted the 20/3.5 on the 65-116 tube (bellows would have been OK), then
mounted a CCTV lens on the front of the 20/3.5. The engineering involved
consisted of a sharp knife, some 35mm film canisters and Scotch tape. I
bought two new CCTV lenses for less than USD20 - one is 4mm FL, the other
8mm FL. They each fit inside the film canister, and careful choice of
barnds of film cansietr means that I can get one to slide into the other, to
give coarse focussing (and the CCTV lens has a helical focus-of-corts).
My initial results were very similar to the excellent examples on the page
above - very close focus/very wide angle/enormous depth of field images, and
have conviced me to do it just a little bit more rigorously to try to get
better repeatability.
Yes, these macro lenses *do* have hteir practical uses (even if, in this
case, it's not actually in use as intended. More as a lens to project the
CCTV lens image onto the 35mm frame size). Recommended.
--
Piers
-----Original Message-----
From: olympus-owner@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:olympus-owner@xxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf
Of R. Jackson
Sent: 27 August 2005 09:10
To: olympus@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [OM] OM macro lenses?
I've always kind of wondered about the 20mm and 38mm macro lenses.
Anyone tried them? I don't own the bellows or the auto-extension tube, so
it's just kind of a passing curiosity, but I'd love to hear something about
the lenses or see photos someone has taken with them.
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