There are tons on ebay, amazon and I'm sure other places on the internet. There is really no need to focus on Nikon for these.
Reversing a Prime Lens to Make a Macro Lens
(27 posts) (14 voices)-
Posted 1 year ago #
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Reversing a G lens is essentially a waste of time. Just pick up a used macro. Even a third-party one will be decent and spare you a lot of trouble.
Incidentally, reversing a lens was technique used in the old days to get higher magnifications than you could get with a standard macro lens, and you didn't do it with "normal" or long lenses, you reversed wide-angles. Reversing a wide-angle turns them into essentially microscopes, especially if you have a bellows or extension tube set. The shorter the focal length of the lens, this higher the magnification reversed. There's a point of diminishing returns as to how short to go, of course. The most popular reversed wide-angle back in the day was the 24mm f2.8 Nikkor. This was a very well corrected lens in reverse, even though of course it was never intended to be used that way.
Using a zoom reversed as a macro is an exercise in futility. They're bad enough in their normal state, reversing them simply makes them crappy macros. Don't waste your time. Unless you plan to get serious with macro work, just go on ebay and pick yourself up either a used macro lens or an old 24mm AI for relative peanuts and do it right.
One more thing, don't shoot stopped down with a reversed lens. The diffraction will kill your shot (as happens normally), and you could get image center flares, depending on your light source and reversed lens. Shoot at the lens's optimum aperture, which is about two stops in from wide. If you need depth of field use focus stacking software and shoot a series of shots. This of course isn't possible with moving targets but is fantastic for static work. You can find info on focus stacking here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_stacking
By the way, can you tell I shoot a lot of macro? :-D
Posted 1 year ago #
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