Mastering Your Kit Lens - Part 7

The Tube Option

Look, straight up I can tell you nothing beats a real macro lens when you want to go really close, heck I have three of them, but you can get awfully close in overall look if not in clarity by using an extension tube or two on your kit lens. 

Using a macro tube and kit lens is useless for true flat field macro work, like slide/neg duplication but for most macro dabblers that is something they will never do. Sure the edges and corners will not be critically sharp with a kitty plus extension tube, but sharp all over its not really that useful for most macro work.

You can get pretty close, in fact right down to 1:1 with the right combo of tube and focal length. One little oddity is that kit lenses designed for mirrorless cameras typically need far less extension tube length to get really close, hence most tube kits for mirrorless rigs only include two shorter rings instead of the standard three.

Just in case your wondering “would a fast standard lens work better on the tubes” the answer is maybe, but probably not.   Fast lenses are really designed to distance work, when was the last time you heard of a f 1.4 macro lens? Generally when mounted to a tube setup, fast glass suffers from all sort of field curvature issues so your kitty could easily outperform the fast fixed focal length lens because at least it is designed to go reasonably close to start with.

Forget about those really cheap manual tube sets on eBay, they have no way of controlling the aperture, everything ends up being shot wide open. Likewise the cheapies won’t work with your cameras metering or auto focus options. You can pick a full auto set up for between $80-150.00, (these will allow auto focusing) the dearer ones are aluminium and the cheaper ones plastic. For occasional kit lens use plastic is fine and will save a little weight in the bag and ultimately if you get all “macro excited” you will progress to a full bore macro lens anyway.

This branch of kit lens tom-foolery will require a solid tripod, unless you want your shots to look like you took them after downing a couple of bottles of red. You will also need to think about supplementary lighting, the on-camera flash will be worse than useless. I use natural light and small reflectors, but you can use artificial light sources as well, anyhow its all about the light when the going gets tight!



Close Focus Filters

Oh I love these innocent looking little mites, they can open a world of creative options for next to no cost, little weight penalty and an ease of use that can’t be beat.

Though you can purchase filters ranging from 1 to 10 dioptre you'll find a one or two dioptre filter will see you through most of your practical requirements, handily extending the close focusing range of your kit lens. Generally the higher the dioptre rating the poorer the clarity, and frankly most 10s I have tried are next to useless.

Using a number one dioptre macro filter in combination with the wide angle end your lens can produces some rather interesting macro affects that I refer to this as “contextual macro”. With this approach you see the surrounding environment combined with a close-up view of the subject, the image at the top of the page is a good example and the following two continue the theme.

Here is an example of a contextual macro shot taken at 18 mm on my Sony 18-55 OSS kit lens, the trick is using the macro filter to allow closer focus but still get the wide angle view and I find the look to be very satisfying.

And another contextual macro for good measure.

The close-up filter can also sometimes have an effect on the bokeh in a nice way, giving smoother out of focus areas.

When used in conjunction with the telephoto end of your lens you can slightly increase the apparent focal length, say making your 55mm look like 65mm. This increase can give a more natural perspective for close-up portraits, note however you won't be able focus anything beyond just a metre and a bit, but for these portraits that’s perfect.

Here I go breaking my own rules and showing my dog pics,
but Holly the Collie just looks so sweet when shot with the  18-55 OSS and a no 1 close up filter,
roughly equals a 65mm lens at f5.6.

Adding a close up filter can also provide a vehicle for shooting creative “Out of Focus” shots, which can be great fun.

Close up filters don't provide perfect clarity across the entire frame into the comers but the centre and out towards the edges of the image will be more than adequately sharp which for most macro work is fine, but even better when you actually want stuff out of focus like the example below.

Not just out of focus, now we have "painterly out of focus", again it is the macro filter that makes this possible.

Small Apertures
Somewhere along the way you have probably heard that you should not stop your aperture down too much otherwise your pics get soft due to diffraction. True enough!  But don’t let that deter you, if you need more depth of field you can always go small on the hole and big on the sharpening, either “in camera” or in post capture editing.
I have found from experience with thousands of images shot at small apertures, they can easily be sharpened up if needed, but the opposite of adding sharpness when it wasn’t even recorded due to too wide an aperture is near impossible.
Of course there are benefits also to using small apertures other than just getting more DOF. You can use slower shutter speeds and tripod to increase motion effects, you can kill stone dead “moire” (weird colour and false detail ) on patterned objects, get around many of the common lens aberrations and probably even control high contrast scenes a bit better.
Anyways, learn to sharpen files properly and you can happily work away with those small apertures, like f16, 18 or even 22, but just to be on the safe side probably best to leave f28 and smaller alone, they are just a “hole to far” for even the best sharpening tools.

Original Raw File Shot at f22 on Sony 18-55 OSS set at 18mm,  note the distortion, chromatic aberration, vignetting and overall softness of the image.

Same image, this is the OCC version (out of camera jpeg), it has less distortion and chromatic aberration and vignetting but still looks a bit soft as a result of diffraction from using such a small aperture.

And now for something better, in this case we have a the raw file version that has had all the corrections applied for CA, vignetting and distortion, but in this case it has been properly sharpened in post to address the loss of clarity from the small aperture used at capture.  Net result, an image that is technically very good and has enormous depth of field.

Mastering Your Kit Lens - Part 1

My Mother in Law, Ivy, one of the nicest ladies you could ever meet, captured with my Sony 18-55 whilst waiting at a bus stop

So your kit lens is rubbish, you know this for a certainty because numerous photo blog sites and test sites have told you so. 

Don't worry most kit lenses are not great when measured or assessed in any empirical way, but realistically your kit lens was almost a freebie so what have we got to moan about.  In any case, without meaning to insult anyone, most kit lenses are capable of better results than most photographers are able to deliver.

Now I have seen a few articles on the web regarding “using your kit lens, getting more out of it” but most seem pretty token at best so I thought “how about I do a series of blog posts that really give you something to chew on, something that will really help and hopefully inspire you”.  There will be lots of words and lots of pics to show you just what you can do, today we will set the scene, but make sure you come back now.

In the words of a past Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, I want you to feel “comfortable and relaxed” about your kit lens.

This blog series might seem misplaced, after all, almost every photographic website will have articles telling you that you simply must replace that “hound doggy” of a lens with something better and the inference being that you cannot possibly get great results until you do so.  

What a crock!

Sure it’s a good idea to buy a new lens if the current one is limiting you, but being brutally honest you’ll gain more by really coming to grips with what your current kit lens can do.  The whole world of consumerism is built upon the premise that any shortfall or problem can be resolved by throwing more money at it.....your money of course.  Truthfully, skill, technique and artistic application will drive you much further than a new lens.  I think I can confidently say that the overwhelming majority of world famous images from the start of the photographic period right up until a few years ago were taken with lenses much less capable than most kit lens found on any new camera!

Yes it's true that your kit lens will not give you that beautiful shallow DOF and the Bokeliciuos Blur you hear so many Photographers waxing about on web forums,  but realistically that look has limited applicability and in any case the lenses that will really sing in such applications are very expensive primes.  Look I would love to occasionally get the look of the Ziess Otus but at $4500.00 Aus, it ain’t going to suddenly appear in my camera box and if I find I actually need that look commercially, I will hire one and charge it out accordingly.

There are so many better things you could spend your dollars on if you are in the early stages of your photographic journey, like a good workshop or on line course, travel to some nice location to use what you currently have and in more practical sense and really good tripod or flash will open up far more possibilities for you than a better lens.

Back to the kit lens.....

I have had a few kit lenses, of those, my Sony E series 18-55mm has proved to be a fine example of the breed and is in fact my most used out of the 50 or so lenses I own.  A Canon 18-55mm I owned for several years produced images that looked a little like they were shot through the bottom of a beer glass and I think my Sony "A" series 18-55 actually was the beer bottle that originally contained the beer in the bottom of the Canons glass, but nonetheless even they redeemed themselves with plenty of good shots.

I have 3 Minolta 35-70 f4s from film era Minoltas, two were really good and one was stellar, that is until I dropped it on a cement floor and misaligned its innards. It still works fine but is soft on one side at the wide end in the now “post flight state”.

The main issues with kit lenses in my experience is "sample variability", which goes a long way towards explaining why user experiences reported on forums are so.....well variable. 

And perhaps why some test sites will call a lens a sours’ ear and others a silk purse.

Of course kit lenses are generally slow of aperture, slow to focus and slow to sell on eBay, but they are not without their virtues either.

Build quality is generally pretty average, lots of low grade plastic, sometimes even in the lens bayonet itself and in many ways it has got worse over the years, trust me on this, there is a world of difference between say a Minolta or Nikon 35-70 of 20 years ago and a new 18-55 kitty of today.  A single turn of the focus ring will lay bare the rough approach of most new kit lenses in comparison to their forebears.

Speaking of the Nikon 35-70, the one I have has consistently proven itself to be a stellar performer on my NEX 5n, in fact it is probably one of the best lenses I have ever put on that little NEXY including fixed focal length jobbies. Note there have been an enormous array of Nikon 35-70s so don't take this as an automatic recommendation.

So are modern kitties all rubbish, are there no redeeming factors?  Actually there are quite a few, the modern kitty whilst no paragon of constructional perfection or optical excellence can be a very useful device indeed.

I must say up front I have found from playing with hundreds of kittys belonging to thousands of past students cameras, some brands and models are much better than others.  The best in terms of optical consistency are the Nikons, no doubt about that at all from my experience, in fact some have been bloody impressive in terms of the rendered files, the worst, no that would be telling, besides my flameproof suit is at the dry cleaners today.

In constructional terms the M4/3 versions all seem pretty solid and the Fuji "x" series are very nicely done and apparently the new “light as air” kit lens attached to the Panasonic GM1 is a bit of a revelation.

In the next blog entry I will examine the optical factors with kit lenses that we can actually do something about.