Olympus Kit 40-150mm stacked with Canon 500D closeup lens

6.01.2014

Olympus Kit 40-150mm stacked with Canon 500D closeup lens

While mowing the lawn the other day I came across a near perfect dandelion-gone-to-seed. It was all alone in the grass (I've done a pretty good job this spring killing off the weeds) and the afternoon light was good. I went into the house and grabbed my camera. But I did something a bit differently for the lens set up.

I took a kit 40-150R Olympus lens. I bought this a year ago for $100 and I think it retails for $150-$200. It has a plastic mount and is very light, weighing less than 7 ounces. But the optics, at least on this sample, are excellent. The plastic mount doesn't bother me. No matter how long the lens lasts, it will be well worth the price I paid. Indeed, the charts provided by slrgear.com show it to be sharp all the way up to F11.

Anyway, hoping not to compromise its sharpness too much, I attached a 500D Canon closeup lens into the filter threads. Mine has a 58mm diameter which fits perfectly on the 40-150. I think I paid about $90 for it, so it isn't cheap, for a small chunk of glass. But it modifies a zoom lens into a macro lens.

Metadata: 74mm, 1/320 sec, F5, ISO200.
I had the minimum shutter speed set to 1/320 and F5 is "wide open" at the 74mm zoom mark.
A touch of fill flash. No cropping.

Center crop at 100%

Focusing is a bit tricky with the 500D attached. It is designed to focus your zoom lens at 500mm (about 20"). That's it: 20" (plus or minus a couple of inches).Once you have achieved focus, you then zoom-in or zoom-out to compose your picture. Zoomed-in I can focus on an object about 1 3/4" in width. If that is too magnified, I just zoom out until I get the composition I am looking for. If my subject is more than 4" in width, I don't need the closeup lens; there is enough magnification in the lens itself to accomplish this without an accessory.

[I also own a 58mm diameter 250D. This is designed to focus your zoom lens at 250mm (about 10"). Fully zoomed-in at the 150mm end of the 40-150, I can focus on an object about 1" in width.]