perfecting mediocrity

This post is almost directly inspired by Neil’s post about those lovely devices that enable us to bring our photographic subjects much closer to us, and give us a much greater level of detail that we would normally think possible.

Along with my lovely new camera and lenses, I’ve acquired a set of auto extension tubes. These differ from the normal extension tubes such that they include the contacts and electronics to feed back lens information, and control data thus allowing for the camera to have a degree of auto focus - in the case of my Kenko auto extension tubes, when the aperture is f/5.6 or brighter. And of course by bringing our focus much closer to our lens, we’re able to effectively magnify our subjects without the use of a dedicated macro lens.

So, what real use do they have?

I found that the extension tubes worked wonderfully - auto focus was not a particularly handy thing, given I had a complete lighting setup available and thus was shooting with an aperture of around f/22. The lens and shooting information that the circuits carry are still very handy though. Sending back the aperture and lens information to store in the image EXIF data is great.

The lenses I have seem to be unable to focus with all 3 rings on - that’s a full 68mm extension. Even with the 70-200 f/2.8, I could not seem to achieve focus. Other than that, I found the tubes to be a whole lot of fun - bringing a new dimension to how I see things.