Congratulations to Stefan Crosa who has been awarded Photo of the Week 23 November 2014. Find out how Stefan created this stunning image.
“This photo shows a macro composition of a rose leaf taken last spring in my home town in Italy after a heavy rain that left us without electricity for few hours. When the sun decided to show up (finally) I went out to take some photographs with my Nikon D600 and a 24-85mm f2.8 lens.
I mounted the lens upside down and started to take some pics. I was lucky I had enough natural light already surrounding me but got some bad results due to the hardness of it, getting shadows from the other leaves around the subject. So I decided to use a flash gun to fill in the dark areas getting the lovely reflections on the water droplets too.
All the camera settings were strictly manual of course as I didn’t have any control of the lens electronics (good challenge to test my skills!). I went back home (electricity was restored hurray!) downloaded the pics and started my Photoshop editing.
About the technique:
I was really into macro photography at the time but I didn’t have much money to spend on a dedicated macro lens, so I came across this technique which is really cheap!
I bought an adaptor ring and flipped the lens around backwards and mounted it on the camera. This way I found an affordable and fun way to experiment with macro photography!
Obviously I’ve lost all the electronics features of the lens e.g. autofocus, image stabilizer, aperture but that made the game more exciting:)
I found it amazing to see the depth of field effect in real time and watch them change as I stopped down the aperture. So when using the reverse adapter, as you look through the eye piece and start stopping down the lens, you will see things get really dark, really fast. Set at f2.8, look at the flower and see the razor thin focal plane move up and down the flower as I made tiny movements with camera. This is in my opinion a fantastic way to experiment with macro photography with no extra money to spend (well the adaptor costs around 5 pounds…) your old lens will do the job perfectly!
Have fun shooting macro!”
Stefan Crosa
28 November 2014
