Shooting with a wide-angle macro lens

- Last week on the Practicing Photographer you saw me open a new lens, a weird 15 millimeter wide angle macro lens, this one right here. You saw me go through some of the stuff that I think about and do when I'm dealing with a new piece of gear, specifically a new lens. Some care and concern issues that I had. And this week I wanna talk about what I do when I get a new lens by way of trying to understand it. After last week's segment, Heather, my producer came up and gave me a hard time for talking about how my lens was learning from me, and okay, maybe that wasn't the right phrase to use.

What I mean is we have this idea that we create tools and then they serve us, but they don't, we learn things back from them. We change the way that we see with a lens, we change the way that we work based on our expectations of what a particular piece of gear can do. So before I go out and shoot with this lens I wanna have a better understanding with it, for a couple of reasons. I don't wanna get out there and see a great shot and be frustrated by the fact that I don't know the gear well enough to get that shot. But more importantly, I don't wanna just go out and stumble around and go, oh, look, this lens can capture this kind of image.

I would like to have an idea ahead of time, so that I can pre-visualize my shots, so that I can recognize subject matter that this lens is going to be well suited for. And so we're here at the Lynda studios right now, so I've, we've got a table set up, I'm just gonna do it here. At how I do really go through this step, I sit down at my kitchen table with a new lens and I start to try and figure it out. Partly I start with my expectations of what the lens is. This is a 15 millimeter macro, meaning its very wide angle, but it has macro capabilities.

So if I'm shooting with a wide angle lens what are my concerns? Well, wide angles can have a lot of distortion around the edges, they can have vignetting, there are questions of whether they're going to be sharp from the center to the edge. So I would like to know some of those things ahead of time. And I can figure that out just by taking some pictures with the camera. So there's, I've got a receding hallway with lots of straight lines in it. When I look in the corner of the frames, I don't even have to actually shoot this, but I will. As I move the camera around I'm looking at the lines going into the corners of the frame and just watching if they curve or bow or bend.

I'm looking in the upper left corner. And they don't seem to. I think this lens is pretty distortion-free, as much as a 15 millimeter lens is. That doesn't mean that it looks like the way the world looks to my eye, but there's not a lot of fish-eye in it, which is really nice. It's what we call a rectilinear quality that this lens has. And that's nice to know that I'm not gonna be finding curves lines. Lines look like what I expect them to. I'm not gonna have to correct them later. And boy, right away, taking that shot I'm faced with the fact that this is a manual focus lens only.

I forget about that. And right away that changes my expectation of what I can do. Shooting with this lens is going to take time. I'm going to run out and quickly shoot stuff, I'm gonna take time to focus. And I don't manually focus that often and it's a skill, it's something you have to practice, it's something you have to train your eye for, particularly on these cameras that don't have focusing aids in the viewfinder. There's no split prism in this viewfinder. So I really need to pay attention to that. The manual curiously said not to turn the focus ring too quickly, because it said it would damage the lens.

I never heard of a lens being damaged by moving the focus ring too quickly. It also was trumpeting the fact that everything in the lens is made of metal. I'm assuming they mean the glass elements are not metal. I'm gonna write off that warning about the focus ring to just being a weird translation, because this feels like a really sturdy lens and I'm glad to know that, it means that I can carry it in my normal bag. So distortion is one of my concerns with a wide angle lens. I'm not seeing any vignetting, I do have the lens shade on to help prevent that.

The next question is macro. So a macro lens is one that can show a true one to one size of an image. Meaning the image that's projected from my subject onto the sensor is actual size. What that means in practical terms is that I can get very, very close and still maintain focus. So I just grabbed, someone handed me some toys, so just to give you an idea of what I can do with this macro lens I am this close and I'm in focus.

You probably can't do that with your normal walk around lens. In fact I think I can get closer if I take off the sun shade. And this is an interesting test. What's the lens like in ordinary circumstances without the shade on? Am I gonna pick up flare from different places? I would like to know that ahead of time. Wow, I'm still in focus. Still able to get focus. I am not worried about depth of field right now. I'm just seeing if I can focus, and I can. I believe the lens is now touching the toy.

I am that close. Now the toy is actually behind me I'm so close. So this is great. The macro is really good. I really can get very, very close. And just now looking through the viewfinder I'm seeing a macro view that I've never seen before. This is a really weird lens, it is so wide angle. So I mentioned this in the last video that one of the things I was intrigued by was the idea of a wide angle macro allowing me to create lots of layers. And by layers I mean a strong foreground, but with a big wide background.

That's often very interesting, because then you've got geometric shapes in the foreground that you can associate with shapes in the background and build up really interesting compositions. So that was one of my expectations, can I actually do that? Maybe not necessarily that much in this particular environment, because there's only so much I can do in a hallway, but right away I can start to see, this isn't gonna work quite the way I was expecting it to, because I have the normal macro depth of field problems.

Depth of field is a function of the aperture that you're using, and the sensor size that you have, it's a function of sensor size because depth of field is also a function of how closely you're focusing. And in macro distances we're focusing at a matter of inches. I looked up, I put a depth of field calculator on my phone. These are really handy things to have if you're macro shooter. If I'm focused at five inches my depth of field on this lens is only about half an inch wide. So that's gonna really change this whole relating things to the background idea, because the background's always gonna be out of focus.

I'm getting a little frustrated having to stay all hunched down over here and I would like to just be able to work in live view. So I'm gonna just attach this tiny little tripod here, so that I can get to a more comfortable position and see in real time what's going on on the back of the camera. For a lens like this that's very handy. So aperture, or depth of field is a function of aperture. I'm gonna change the aperture, this is an all manual camera. I have an aperture ring.

And I have an aperture ring that's very strange. It's not, there are no stops. I can just freely rotate the aperture and, and so I can't, normally I'm looking through a camera and I know, oh, three clicks to the right is gonna be one stop. I can't do that. This is another thing that's gonna slow me down when I'm shooting. I'm gonna have to actually look at what aperture I'm at if I care. I'm gonna go all the way down to F 32, try and focus here, and that gives me a little more depth.

And the next thing I wanna check is how accurate is the metering through this lens. Because there's no electronic communication here, this is an all manual lens, sometimes things can get messed up. That's actually pretty well exposed. And I have no exposure compensation dialed in. But the background is still, I'm not gonna be able to have a really tack sharp macro focus foreground and a sharp background. So that's really gonna change the way that I'm thinking of shooting with this lens.

I'm not gonna walk around going, look at this thing and that thing back there, they're the same shape, even though they're miles apart, I can relate those shapes to each other. I'm gonna walk around and go, look, here's this thing here and a weird smear out there. Does that work as a composition? Can I get my depth of field deep enough that I can give it more shape? This is gonna change the way that I'm working, or change the way that I'm thinking.

I'm curious about this shift thing that it does, which was not a feature that I knew of the lens. And what that does is let me shift up here and then tilt down. And it is changing the geometry in this scene. Here's what I get here. The shift feature on this lens, the manual says has much more of an impact when you're working with a cropped sensor camera. This is a full frame sensor, so it may just be that this isn't doing very much. It does let me compose differently though, because I can actually get the camera into a different position with it.

That's kind of cool. That might be a useful feature to have. So, I feel like I've done about all I can do now without getting out and finding some actual subject matter and working with it. But I do know that when I'm going out I wanna take a little tripod with me, because I'm gonna be up close to things. I need to start thinking in terms of macro shooting, which is actually normally something that I do in a studio setting, so yeah, I'm gonna take a tripod. I'm gonna have to expect to work very slowly, because the manual focus, a weird manual aperture ring, and I'm gonna have to think in terms of depth of field, which I just wasn't counting on that much, so it's good to know that.

I'm gonna stick with my layering idea for now, go shoot some with that. For this first round of shooting I'm not gonna real hung up on coming back with wonderful, masterful images, because I haven't looked at this stuff on a computer yet. Maybe I'll take some of these images in first and see, make sure my focus is good, make sure I'm not getting flare that I wasn't noticing in the viewfinder. These are all questions that I need to answer before I go out, if I want to one, improve the chances that I'm gonna come back with technically good images, but more importantly, just to get my eye and my brain seeing the way that this lens does.

That is what's gonna open up the world to this particular lens through my eye.