Old Dog Photography

So I’ve managed over the past few months to gather up a mangy collection of hardware for my E-510, the purpose of (some of) it being to enable me to make macros. I thought it was about time to pull together some sort of side-by-side comparison of how it all performs.

Basically, I wanted to see f I have any hardware with redundant capabilities so that I could sell the “surplus” off on eBay. Meanwhile, I thought that you — my gentle reader — could save some money by *not* buying some of this gear in the first place.

So here’s the setup.

I picked a small flower from our yard, lit it with a single 85 watt CFL tube through a white umbrella, and photographed it with my Olympus E-510 using various combinations of lenses and extension tubes and such. Here’s a picture of the basic (and I do mean basic…) setup:

The basic lens configurations were as follows:

• Olympus E-system 50mm f/2.0 macro lens
• Olympus 50mm lens with EX-25 extension tube
• Olympus 50mm lens with EC-20 2x teleconverter
• Olympus 70-300mm lens set to 300mm
• Olympus OM 50mm f/1.8 lens
• Olympus OM 50mm lens with a variety of extension tubes I got for a few dollars off eBay

In all cases, the pictures you’ll see below were taken with the camera set to ISO 100, the lens set to f/11, and the camera in either aperture (“A”) priority mode (for automatic lenses) or manual (“M”) mode (for the OM lens). Images were taken at the optics’ minimum focus distance (i.e., as close to the camera as I could focus at). As part of this little exercise, I also measured the approximate distance between the filter on the front of the lens and the center of the flower (my focus point).

As far as post-processing is concerned, I used Aperture 2.0 (the software, running on my Mac) to do automatic level & color correction on all images. I didn’t resize anything, or fiddle with contrast, or do anything fancy.

So here’s what came of my experiments:

Configuration	Image thumbnail (click to expand)
E-system 50mm f/2.0 macro lens Min. focus distance approx. 3.75″
E-system 50mm f/2.0 macro lens with extension tube Min. focus distance approx. 1.75″
E-system 50mm f/2.0 macro lens with 2x teleconverter Min. focus distance approx. 3.75″
E-system 70-300mm lens, at 300mm Min. focus distance approx. 28.5″
Olympus OM 50mm f/1.8 lens Min. focus distance approx. 13.75″
Olympus OM 50mm lens with 15mm extension tube Min. focus distance approx. 5.75″
Olympus OM 50mm lens with 23mm extension tube Min. focus distance approx. 4.5″
Olympus OM 50mm lens with 36mm extension tube Min. focus distance approx. 3.25″
Olympus OM 50mm lens with 64mm extension tube Min. focus distance approx. 2.125″

My conclusions:
Originally (not long after I bought my E-510), I bought the 70-300mm zoom — in part because it can be used as a macro lens, if not up close. My experiments here reinforced that. It’s a good lens, nearly as good as the 50mm — if you’ve got a tripod to put it on, and don’t mind its weight or the really long focus distance.

Subsequently I bought the 50mm f/2.0 macro lens — both as a better close-up macro lens, and as a good all-around prime lens. I also bought the Olympus EX-25 extension tube, and later the 2x teleconverter. Judging by the images, the extension tube was pretty much a waste of money — since the (more capable, but admittedly far more expensive) teleconverter yields very similar images.

By the way, I only measured minimum focus distance with these experiments, but the extension tube gives you an extremely short *maximum* focus distance — just a fraction of an inch beyond the minimum. The teleconverter doesn’t have this limitation, and can be used with other lenses (than the 50mm) as well. Unless I uncover some unique capability that it’s currently hiding, my extension tube is eBay-bound for sure…

Meanwhile, as you can see, my trusty old OM 50mm lens turns in a pretty good performance with extension tubes — but of course, using this setup means you do everything (focus and exposure) manually. This would be fine for still subjects like the flower, but pretty ugly for moving things like insects. Also, my post-processing of these images essentially hides one of the big limitations of extension tubes — the image gets darker with every mm of extension. By the time I had all the extensions stacked, I had to use a flashlight to get enough light on the flower for focusing.

Hopefully this treatment helps somebody else out there who may be making buying decisions…