Hackszine.com: Create a macro lens from an old 50mm

Create a macro lens from an old 50mm

Lambert Smith has a great howto for converting a standard 50mm lens from an old SLR camera into a dedicated macro lens for your digital camera. By reversing the 50mm lens and using a number of extension tubes. The photo above is his conversion hack on a Canon Powershot G3, which has a non-interchangeable zoom lens. Custom adapters can be made by gluing filter rings back to back, so you can do this with a normal digital, a DSLR, or even a traditional film camera.

Once set up in this manner, your camera will have a fixed point of focus (unless you use a bellows). When taking a photo, you simply move the whole camera toward or away from the subject until it is in focus.

Reversed 50mm - A Dedicated Macro Lens

Posted by Jason Striegel | May 31, 2008 08:43 PM
Photography | Permalink | Comments (1)

Comments

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Posted by: mark on June 24, 2008 at 2:17 PM

You're just rediscovering one of the old poor-struggling-photographer tricks from 30 years ago. They actually made mount adapters for your SLR to turn the lens around and mount it by the filter threads, and had adapters to mount filters to the lens base also. In a pinch, you could do it manually and light-seal it with black tape, but that's a desperation move. I still use my old Minolta XD-11 by the way.