New Lens, New Photos!

[Jason Green]

Hi all,

I have just received my Japanese-made, America-dispatched Opteka 10x HD macro lens. The lens is £29.99, plus just shy of £10 for shipping.

I and am very pleased with the resultant photos! See these...

Comparison

^ Old Lens - New Lens ^
You can see the difference made here! The springtail is about 1.2mm long - S. viridis.


Spider mite...
...about 1.2mm long.


Fleshfly
Cropped from 5mp to 2, the resized to 800x600. Auto-corrected.

The lens is very well made and reasurringly heavy. I ordered it last Wednesday afternoon - and received it from the US in today's post! The package even came with a starter kit; comprising of a mini tripod, lens cleaning solution, lens cloth and a set of three screen protectors. None of which was mentioned when I purchased it.

Please let me know what you think of the image quality! Any bad chromatic abberation, lack of contrast, softness, pin-cushioning, etc.?

Take care,

Jason

[mickmassie]

You can't be robbed at the price. Although the images are a bit soft, you probably couldn't get them at that magnification as cheaply otherwise. A reversing ring would be the only alternative at the price and they are clunky to use.

Just a thought: when I want a real big magnification, I take hand held shots down a low power microscope with a compact digicam. Some subjects have to dead, but for many tiny animals it can be done with them alive (inc. in water).

M.

[GrayB]

Jason,
I'm looking forward to seeing more detailed shots from you, enjoy
Gray.

[ron1863]

Hi Jason, good to see you are enjoying your new lens. I particularly like the flesh fly

[Bruce Williams]

Good to see you enjoying your new lens Jason. First results are pretty good, particularly considering the cost of the lens.

Chromatic aberration does not appear to be a significant problem with any these images.

The springtail image is a little soft which might be in part due to the fact that it was taken without flash - even at 1/300s there could be slight softening due to subject or camera movement. Also you used an aperture of f/4.3 which will give a very shallow dof.

The mite is really quite good for such a small subject. Exposure was 1/480s at f/5.6.

Like Ron I preferred the flesh fly shot - I'm sure you must be very pleased with this one too. You've made the best possible use of the very shallow dof available at f/3.5. IMO this image would have been even better at f/5.6.

It would be interesting to see how this lens combo performs in terms of dof and how image quality is affected by diffraction limitation at each aperture setting. Ideally the camera should be fixed (tripod?) and shoot the same subject without moving the camera. A piece of lichen covered twig makes a good test subject.

Bruce

[Keith Talbot]

yep i like the fleshfly as well,

keep it up

[Gerel]

Nice shots Jason,

Very impressive for £30, definite step up from the binocular lens

Next stop MP-E 65 and image stacking software

What lens are you using the new one in front of, or is it a stand alone lens.

Steve

[Words]

Got to agree that the flesh fly is impressive.

[cutecoot]

Oh, WoW! ... for £29.99?!! Great stuff, Jason .. I might be tempted to track one of those lenses down myself .

[JRsbugs]

Very good results Jason, those little springtails are not easy to get, yours are bigger than mine! Using a tripod is fine if the things stay still, then I imagine you would need to use a remote to avoid rocking the camera on taking the pics, for moving subjects not ideal. I take all my pics hand held, and of course the lighting conditions are usually not good either so perfection is not easy to get but at least we get the bugs!

I would also like to know what lens and camera you are using, I'm guessing your new lens is an attachment? Sure is a cheap way around macro photography!

Janet