quick question about thomas shahans macro video i.e. 50mm with canon A720 IS

breadbin

hi all, i have been watching this guys, Thomas Shahan's, videos for a while now and have a question about this one here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoBm_Hgjc6Y&list=UUM80atpL9P_G7_ORlFOzmAg&index=9&feature=plcp

he uses a k200d with reversed lens, extension tubes and sometimes bellows to get in that close for the stills but for video he uses a normal Canon A720 IS to make the videos. in a couple of places in the video he zooms in incredibly close i think about 10 seconds into it and the bit at the end with the ant. he commented that he uses a 50mm prime lens in front of the canon for these parts.

i tried this with my own camera, a ricoh grd which has great macro video but the 50mm prime lens just makes everything smaller! does he mean like take one of the lenses out of the 50mm? or how is it done?

frozenfrozen

A lens make the big world small to capture it on the sensor, so a lens backwards makes the small world big. he's turning the lens around most likely, haven't watched the video but I presume that's what hes doing

DaireQuinlan

I've done it before by inverting a 50mm in front of a bridge camera (fuji s602) lens...

breadbin

just invert the 50mm in front of the ricoh then? i tried it and it just makes everything smaller, maybe if i manual focus or something? i'll give it another go, nice shot of the ants btw:) would it make a difference if i was constantly at 28mm cos the ricoh is fixed

DaireQuinlan

breadbin wrote: »

ah yeah i know about reversing the 50mm onto the k10d for still photographs but he says he just held the 50mm onto the front of the canon a720 for the video and when i try to do this with the point and shoot it makes everything smaller cos i suppose the ricoh has lenses of its own and its not going directly onto the sensor? i don't know really.

That's more or less what I did. The s602 has it's own zoom lens. I reversed a 50mm in front of its lens and stuck it on with duck tape. Bit of fiddling and you can get pretty close closeups. Sucked a lot of late away though, I think I also used an external strobe for the above.

DaireQuinlan

breadbin wrote: »

just invert the 50mm in front of the ricoh then? i tried it and it just makes everything smaller, maybe if i manual focus or something? i'll give it another go, nice shot of the ants btw:) would it make a difference if i was constantly at 28mm cos the ricoh is fixed

right, just saw your edit there. Yes I think I had the s602 zoomed out as far as it would go and in manual focus mode. I forget the details, it was a fair few years ago

breadbin

yeah sorry for the edit the way i read it first i thought you were saying you reversed the 50mm onto a slr until i re-read it. it stands to reason this would work with video on the s602 too for you. what i was doing was putting the 50mm in front of the ricoh and focusing then so maybe i might try manually focusing it or something