{"id":394,"date":"2010-03-28T19:52:31","date_gmt":"2010-03-29T00:52:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/siskinphoto.com\/blog\/?p=394"},"modified":"2012-04-12T16:37:23","modified_gmt":"2012-04-12T21:37:23","slug":"tubes-and-bellows","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/siskinphoto.com\/blog\/?p=394","title":{"rendered":"Tubes and Bellows"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\"Branded<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The further the lens is from the sensor the closer the point of focus is to the lens. I have always thought that this is counterintuitive. If I want to focus closer, and thus make the subject bigger I need to move the lens away from the film or sensor. Regardless of how it should be this is the way it is. So if I could put an empty tube between the lens and the camera body the lens would become a macro lens? Yes, that is exactly right. There are two kids of empty tubes: rigid ones called extension tubes and flexible tubes called bellows.<\/p>\n

I think that extension tubes are much easier to work with, particularly in the field. Still you need to do zone focusing, which I discussed in the last blog. A bellows will give you continuous focus. In fact if you start with a long lens, like a 135mm lens, you can focus to infinity with a bellows. Of course this only works with a lens that isn\u2019t in a mount designed for a camera, like an enlarging lens or even a view camera lens. But you can use a standard camera lens, like a 50 f1.8 with an extension tube or a bellows. Fixed focal length lenses, particularly shorter focal lengths work very well with either the bellows or the tubes.<\/p>\n

Nikon has made a lot of both tubes and bellows over the years. The first tubes I know about were the K tubes. These were completely manual. Not only didn\u2019t they give the camera any auto-focus information or exposure information, they didn\u2019t even stop the lens down automatically. When you see a set of these they\u2019ll generally be pretty cheap. There are also a lot of other brand tubes that are very inexpensive. Since there are no actual optics in an extension tube buying cheap may make sense.<\/p>\n

\"Spring<\/a>There is one tube that I should mention the Nikon BR-4. This tube will stop down a lens before you shot if you use a dual cable release. So you can use this with manual tubes like the K tubes, or with a bellows, because bellows don\u2019t stop the lens down either. You can also use it if you reverse mount a lens, which I\u2019ll get to soon.<\/p>\n

I really like having a few extension tubes in the camera case. They don\u2019t take up much room and they provide a really high quality macro image. I\u2019ve attached a bunch of images made with extension tubes. One other thing I want to mention about bellows: you can adapt a view camera to a digital camera and use the bellows of the view camera. This gives you camera movements in addition to simple bellows. You can read more about his here<\/a>.\u00a0 Next time, more macro!<\/p>\n

I have a new article on Architectural Lighting coming out in the May\/June issue of Photo Technique Magazine<\/a> . I hope you\u2019ll check it out. I also hope you\u2019ll check out my classes at BetterPhoto.<\/a><\/p>\n

An Introduction to Photographic Lighting<\/a><\/p>\n

Portrait Lighting on Location and in the Studio<\/a><\/p>\n

Business to Business: Commercial Photography<\/a><\/p>\n

Thanks, John Siskin<\/p>\n

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The further the lens is from the sensor the closer the point of focus is to the lens.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/siskinphoto.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/siskinphoto.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/siskinphoto.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/siskinphoto.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/siskinphoto.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=394"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/siskinphoto.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1553,"href":"https:\/\/siskinphoto.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/394\/revisions\/1553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/siskinphoto.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/siskinphoto.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/siskinphoto.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}