Macro Lens questions for digital sculpture art

Development Asset Creation
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Hi friends!

We are NOT camera people lol, we are artists who are trying to learn photogrammetry as fast as we can for creating digital art. We’ve searched but haven’t found answers so here are our questions.

We have a regular old Canon 5i with standard 18-55 lens. This seems fine for most of what we do, we have a zoom lens as well for exterior work, We’ve heard you can use it as a macro lens but we can’t get it to focus as close as we need it so we guess we need a macro lens.

We received a small grant that allowed us to purchase a very good computer/camera connected turntable and a high quality ring/flash with both lens and light polarizer filters which are amazing to remove shine and allow the high intensity flash to blow out any shadows.

As you can see in the picture below, sometimes we are shooting small pieces with even smaller details which require us to shoot extra close up shots as small as a bug. If you look on the shoulder of the sculpture you might be able to see a tiny fairy with wings on her shoulder for example.

You can see how close our rig let’s us get and we need a macro lens that doesn’t distort and will match the photos taken with our 18-55 stock lens. Small grant funds have run out lol, so we are looking for something we can pick up inexpensively new or used from ebay.

Help us ObiWan! What should we purchase???

thanks

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Hi, we can’t give you specific recommendation what to purchase, but you can also ask on our Facebook Arena page to get some advices.

 

3

Anyone? Bueller :wink:

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Hi, assuming you are focus stacking, you could try using macro tubes as a very inexpensive experiment, just make sure that either the tubes have the electronics to let you stop down the lens or you can stop down manually on the lens, otherwise you will be shooting wide open and you will have a tiny depth of field and need to stack a lot of images. I cannot guarantee the results of this but it may well be worth a try. For instance I used my super cheap tube set to take this image of a log at f22, using an old manual lens i picked up in a car boot sale for £4 . adapter cost me around £12, tubes cost me about £10-15 (with electronics they are a lot more). So total cost of under £30, and obviously you can use the tubes on any lens: This is shot at 80mm from abut 30 cm away, so in theory would give a very precise mesh although there would be a lot of work needed:

 

 

5

Thanks Wallace

We are going to try the tubes and see where that gets us… I think it should work after researching them a bit and a full set of decent tubes was only $70

thanks again