Apr 22, 2024

Experimenting With Budget Macro Setup - Olympus 12-50mm Kit Lens With Extension Tubes

Insect macro is so fun, and I can spend the entire afternoon hunting for bugs and spiders. Besides the thrill of discovering new insects that I have not seen before; part of the excitement was also experimenting with different lighting alternatives and gear setup to boost magnification. The quickest way to do macro is to get the rather expensive dedicated macro lens, but if you are not shooting macro a lot, and it is not what you do 90% of the time, yet you want to achieve some high magnification shots, there are many options for you to do so. The Olympus M.Zuiko 12-50mm F3.5-6.3 has a dedicated macro function, once enabled can give you about 0.72x (equivalent to 35mm format) magnification, which is quite incredible on its own. I decided to amplify the magnification further by adding extension tubes, and this was quite an interesting trial, with really decent results. The image quality, especially sharpness and flaw controls (spherical aberrations, purple fringing, corner softness, etc) are far from the level of a true macro lens, but on a pure budget standpoint, the images are satisfactory. In my latest YouTube video, I also demonstrated my gear setup which includes wireless flash and all my camera settings, you can find it here (click). 

Summary of gear setup: 
OM System OM-1 with 12-50mm kit lens with Meike Extension Tubes
Olympus FL-50R external flash fired wirelessly, triggered by on camera flash FL-LM2
Softbox attached to the wireless flash, and flash power controlled manually. 
Camera settings: 1/250, F8-11 (adjusted as necessary), ISO200























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2 comments:

  1. Amazing results Robin. What extension tubes are you using? I used to own a 12-50mm, it was great lens, very sharp but I sold it in the end, to save space and because I moved to using primes only. My only zoom lens now is the tiny Panasonic 12-32mm.

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    1. The extension tubes were China made, brand was Meike, very cheap, but with electronic contacts so I can still adjust the lens aperture and AF operations through the camera.

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