Category: MACRO

Last weekend was the “Lange Nacht der Museen” in Vienna. For 13€ you get free entrance to mostly all museums in Vienna. We decided to give the Kunstkammer a try. As usual, in the museum was not a lot of light and a lot of people. But my Sigma 50mm 1.4 could deal with both. The guys in the background are blur and with 1.4 you get a lot of light in the sensor. Yeah, I know with a full frame it would be better. Lets see next year with the 6D… 🙂

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Summer, time to relax. Mostly u just sit somewhere, probably next to a lake and just enjoy…

How about just take a picture from the ground… sometime impressing.

In the first post of this series I write how we improved our 3D-Printer to print lager and more complex models. I also mentioned that i want a powerful and cheap LED-Ring for my DSLR. So folks, here is step 2:

After some successful new prints with the filament holder I tuned some of the parameters for the filament (Temperature, Speed etc.) and also fine adjust the printer. After this, a new CAD project had to be done. The first draft i cam up with was a single tube with 90×90 mm and 5 mm thick. For the inner diameter I choose 70 mm in order to fit a 77 mm filter winding for my Sigma 50 mm /1.4. This Lens have a 77 mm filter winding but the lens is actually only 67 mm in diameter. I fitted 32 holes in it, each 5 mm diameter because the most LEDs have 5 mm, and print it. During the print I searched for LEDs. I ended up with 40 LW514 because they have a luminous intensity of around 35 cd. This will give me in sum 1120 cd with an beam angle of 15°. This will give me around 4000 lx in a distance of 0.5 m and 1100 in a distance of 1 m. For example a TV studio have around 1000 lx.

The printed ring had some issues with the holes so I had to drill them to 5 mm but i looks fine. Unfortunately I hadn’t think about the mounting for the LEDs and also protection of the circuit and so on. But how cares…

A friend of mine came up with a great idea for soldering, so that we don’t need an additionally PCB or wires. We used the leds of the LED to create an inner and an outer Ring. The inner ring is the VCC and the outer GND. Between two LEDs we soldered a resistor (100k Ohms) as series resistance. But take a look for yourself… 🙂

Sadly i didn’t take a picture of the full ring working so here is a picture with 10 active LEDs, quite bright. But I wasn’t satisfied with the result so I imitatively start to think about V2…

To be continued…

As I just write, I just got a macro extension tube. Every time I ran into the same problem: i had not enough light… so i checked some websites to buy a LED-ring like this. Unfortunate some people say that these devices have not enough power… so is decided to build my own LED ring so that i will ever have enough light.

Luckily we just bought a 3D printer at work and I am in charge to get familiar with this device. The printer we are using is a Felix 2.0. Is a very easy and i think well priced device for the most applications. Also the community of the printer provide upgrades and the distributor, Felix-Printers, provide upgrade kits if a new version is rolled out. We had a few prints before, but mostly for Students and colleagues. We had a few problems with the feed of the filament so we came up with the idea to build a holder for the rolls. First we bought some rack mounts from a local store an mount them on the wall.

On the picture u can also see the second step, the holder for the ball-bearing. We found a quick solution for CAT drawings here. Autodesk 123D is a free drawing tool for every System, because it will run in the browser window. We designed the holders and print them with our printer.

As the next step we step we used ball-bearings to pivot the filament roll. For this we came up with a normal staff of aluminum. At the ends we mounted the ball-bearings. 

The final result is nice to look:

The CAD File can be found here.

To be Continued….

Today i found a great picture of a eye in the WWW… and i think to myself, ok let’s try this out. I played around with some settings and end up with the standard combination of the EF-S 18-55 and the EF12. But i have some troubles with the light and it was very hard to not move the eye when the shutter clicks… damn evolution!  I take around 50 pictures and this is the best one… :/ not that clear, not that in focus.

The main Problem is the light. So if i can get an LED ring I will try that again. Maybe i can get a 25 mm ring for my Sigma 50mm/1.4. That my can solve also some of the troubles about shutter speed and eye movement. To hold my head in the right position I used a paper roll… Here a picture of the “setup” 🙂

A friend of mine just borrowed me the his EF12 II extension tube. But today i had no time for some more shots so i just took too two in the kitchen… 🙂

It is really amazing how close you can get to the objects. Also all features of the camera are usable. I used my 18-55mm EF-S IS II and i’m really impressed what you can get for 75 €!

I’ve decided that i need a macro lens… but i can’t afford one… so i decided i need a Achromatic lens… can’t also afford this. BUT! Today i spoke to a friend and he told me he has a macro extension tube, used but in good condition. Next week i will try some test shots, hopefully the tube is worth 50 €. So, some pictures will come soon, but for this time, here some boring macro shots… 🙂