Cheap Marco Shooting : Reverse Lens Method

[Koji™]

Just recently someone point to me a way to take marco shoots without a marco lens. Tried his method out and surprisingly it work big time for me. Still practising around with this method and trying to get the hang of it.

It's not a new thing but I guess it's fun for people to try this method out on their own camera with detachable lens. Simplty just reverse the lens of your camera and do manual shooting with it.

To apply the reverse lens technique to your photos, you'll need:

* An SLR camera

* Your normal 50mm (or similar) lens

Step One
Remove the lens from your camera.

Step Two
Turn the lens the opposite way and attach it to the body of the camera so the bit that attaches to the camera body is at the front.

Step Three
Keep your hand on the lens at all times. Pulling it back towards the camera body. Otherwise the lens will detached and you'll let light into the camera resulting in overexposed images.
You can also tap the lens to the camera body if you are gonna be using it for a long time.

Note - I have only use this technique on the Canon EOS 550D. I'm sure it will work on alot of SLR camera of other brands as well. I'm using it's basic kit lens of 18-55mm and so far result is pretty good.

The down turn is that your shooting is gonna be all in manual for the lens is not connected correctly to your camera thus all you can play around is the ISO and shutter speed.

This is an example of the experiment test shoot this morning using my 18-55mm lens reversed on a 2cm bug.


Shoot on a piece of frog bit leafs


Shoot of a 1.2cm shrimp with flash


I hope this technique can help people without marco lens like me to take better close up pictures.