Mitchie has my macro lens since a while, since she likes to take close-up photos of the flowers she planted, and also other stuff. My macro lens is the Zuiko Digital 50mm 1:2 Macro ED lens from my Olympus Four Thirds DSLR; the best lens I ever had for that system. And with Mitchie’s MMF-2 adapter it can also be used on the newer Micro Four Thirds cameras, retaining autofocus.
I had bought her an older and manual OM 50mm 1:3.5 Auto-Macro lens, also with adapter, but recently I borrowed that to use it on my OM-2n film camera, the system to which it originally belongs.
Before giving it back to her, my view fell onto her camera on our living room coffee table, so I decided to mount it onto my OM-D E-M10 camera, and with her macro lens on my camera I’d take a photo of my macro lens on her camera.
Thought and done. In the dim LED reading light I had to expose for 60 seconds, and that looked like this:
Hm. I didn’t really like the colours, so off they went with emulating a Fuji Neopan Acros 100 film. But I still wasn’t very happy with this picture. First there was that dust which I should have cleaned, but more important was the question what I wanted to show – my original idea had been “my lens on her camera” – of which you don’t see much here.
Ok. I moved to our dining room area, where I have one of my studio strobes on a large tripod with boom (and counter weight) permanently set up. I dusted off my lens and Mitchie’s camera a bit, and also got my second studio strobe as the main light, bounced off the wall behind me. With a black light blocker / reflector as the background, and some settings on the lights (I wanted to use f/8 on Mitchie’s macro lens), I ended up with this:
Et voilà – My macro lens on Mitchie’s camera – photographed with her macro lens on my camera.
From first idea to final result: about 1 hour. The important thing is to not give up if the first attempt wasn’t what you had in mind.
Oh, by the way: these photos aren’t sharpened; I almost never do that. That old OM Zuiko macro lens has a very nice and kind of “natural” looking sharpness, not “clinically” perfect like my digital or the newer 60mm Micro Four Thirds macro lenses, but – yes, I’d call it pleasing.
And manually focusing an old analog macro lens like this one is a breeze on newer digital cameras, especially if you enlarge the photo in your viewfinder or on the rear display. It’s actually easier to do than with more modern autofocus lenses because these focus in steps. And these steps might be as small as they are, but they’re far from being analog. Much easier and faster with a real focus ring like on that old lens. I love it.
Thanks for viewing and reading.