Playing with macro

Last week I talked a bit about my new and my old DSLR (the latter has found a new owner by now), and showed some demo photos. With the new lens you can zoom in really close on any subject, in fact you have to watch out not to hit the subject with your lens, that’s how close you can get.

Unfortunately the photo that I used as an illustration was a bit out of focus, so here’s a new one (of a ten cent coin this time).

Clicking the photo will again lead to a 100% crop saved at the 85% JPEG quality level.

As you can see, this time it’s nice and sharp. I filled the background with pure black in The GIMP by the way.

So that is what you pay the big bucks for, for image quality.

*Cough*

The next photo was taken with my point-and-shoot, which is not necesarily cheap, but which has pretty much the same macro as a 100 euro camera has.

As you can see what buying a lens five times as expensive as the kit lens has got me is the same macro capacities as those of a cheap point-and-shoot.

Any differences you see here have mostly got to do with differences in lighting. In fact, if I had to pick a winner, I’d have to pick the shot from the P ‘n’ S, as that one is sharper in the corners and zooms in 5% further than the DSLR.

Obviously, to the people who know about such things, the Sigma 17-70 is not a true macro lens. It’s maximum magnification is 1:2.3, which means that every centimetre on the light sensitive camera sensor represents 2.3 centimetres in real life. Still, it’s the first time I can get cheap-pocket-camera close with a DSLR.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 7th, 2012 at 6:40 pm and is filed under Lightsmithing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.