El-Cheapo Lenses

Cool; I appreciate the solid advice.

Here are a few of the images that I'm hoping to improve upon. I'm happy with the images, but I know they can be better. Kinda like the images that you're producing.

Alright tonight I finally took my first pic with my el cheapo setup, and right out of the gate its delivering solid images.

I ended up getting an El Nikkor 80mm f5.6 enlarger lens because its a six element lens, opposed to the El Nikkor 75mm that only has four elements. And at under $50 it was a no brainer. Attached is the a 1953 D cent on top of my Rubik's Cube The image is unedited and is exactly as shot from the camera.



I want to give a sincere thank you to all who have contributed to this photography forum, most notably rmpsrpms. You've got a true talent as a skilled photographer as well as an educator. You have very generously shared your knowledge to help us.

I have a long road ahead of me, but the old saying is true in that getting there is half the fun.

Looks good LTB! ...Ray

It's actually an amateur method of doing things, as I know I could probably do it all in 1 application, I just don't know how...so I use 3 applications...Corel Paint Shop Pro X2 to straighten the coin in the image and to enlarge. Then I use SnagIt to capture that image (reduces size) and then crop it to a black square background. Then I use Gimp 2 to place all the images onto a large black rectangle canvas background and add text if not a slab.

It sounds like a lot but I can do all the steps from start to finish in less than 5 minutes.

For the background I typically have a small black dowel that's mounted to a square base that's covered in non-reflective black fabric. I place the raw coin on top of the dowel so the lens only focuses on the coin and blurs the entire background. I still need to build another setup like that for the el cheapo setup. I'll take a pic of my entire setup later and you'll see that I'm keeping in the spirit of the thread by being an el cheapo

Ok as promised, here is my El Cheapo setup...

A targus tripod (Target $22), 2 Jansjos lights (Ikea $20), wood block and dowel (Lowes $3), ConnectMyNikon software (Internet $9), Nikkor 80mm f5.6 Enlarger Lens ( ebay $44), Spiratone Rapid Rail Macrobel Bellows ( ebay $49), M43-M39 Lens Mount Ring Adapter ( ebay $2) all for a grand total of $149.





And here is the reverse of that 1953 D cent.

Very nice setup for $149 and producing good results.

Now, let's talk about a couple things...

1) What camera are you using, and what's the original image size?
2) How are you downsizing for web publishing?
3) What post-processing are you doing?

Ray

PS...also, what aperture setting are you using?

Hi Ray,

1) Nikon D5000, image size 4288 x 2848
2) The two images of the 1953 D I just uploaded to photobucket
3) The only post processing I did on the 1953 D was straighten. Other than that they are exactly how I shot the image. These are jpg format BTW
4) For aperture it's one click between 5.6 and 8...and this lens goes to 32

Ah bummer that photobucket won't allow the full size image...as you're well aware you know that a usb microscope isn't needed because the zoomed level of detail on these images is just insane.

Cool; will do for 1 and 2. I'll do some research to see what ViewNX is all about.

3) Straightening is rotating the coin image so the mottos are perfectly horizontal.