Today I wanted to try out a cheap ring led light I bought last year on eBay. First I had to find 2 double a batteries and see if it was still working, it did. The weather outside was OK with some sun but mostly overcast. In this condition and close to the ground and my subject I turned the ring light on and of to see on the light meter a difference of no more than half a stop. Not mush in these circumstances but on my screen I could see that the darker parts in the flower where more lit, I will try it some more the coming day’s to find out if its worth finding batteries for it next time.
I used my 5 year old Fujifilm X-e1 with an adapter so I could use my 50mm 1.8 Nikon lens that I already had in the film days. Because I wanted to take pictures of flowers and insects I used a 36mm extension tube, a little long I know but I want to try it. I have not calculated it, wouldn’t know how to do it, but the magnification is not 1 to 1 like with my dedicated 105mm macro lenses. But I could get close and with an aperture of 2.8 there is only a little area in focus but the background is so smooth that it is almost monotone.
Most of the time when I shoot with the Fuji i use raw and B&W JPEG’s. I like to see the world in black and white, don’t know why, less distractions maybe. Some of the pictures I show you here are straight from the camera, the color pictures are lightly edited in Lightroom. The two pictures of insects are not as sharp as I wanted them to be but that has not so mush to do with the lens combination but with my luck getting it sharp.
The tiny Nikon lens is not made for macro photography, the focus ring is small and from closest focusing distance to infinity is a little bit more than half a turn. Combined with the 36mm extension tube there is not so mush to focus, so like most of the times when I shoot macro I leave the focusing ring on one distance and move the camera back and forth to focus. This method works good on my Nikon D7100 but on the X-e1 it’s harder because of the tiny few finder. With the kind of dreamy pictures i wanted to take of the flowers it’s less important where the focus is in my opinion.
My photography notebook 