Macro work with video

[Peter Emery]

I'm shooting a doc on watches and I need to be able to shoot macro work of watches. The format will be digibeta or HDV. With stills macro work I would normally use extension tubes at the back of the lens because they are cheap and have no optical elements thus keeping good image quality. Does anyone know if such things exist for video cameras? Help

 

Peter

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

Usually there's an optical adjustment on the back of the lens which allows macro shooting. This is cerainly the case with every ENG style lens I've ever seen; I don't know how things like digiprimes work, if you were to use those.

 

On an HDV camera, it would of course depend on the camera. Most lenses for the HD100 will work in the way I've just described, and most of the fixed-lens cameras will have some sort of provision. Check first, though.

 

Phil

[Stephen Williams]

I'm shooting a doc on watches and I need to be able to shoot macro work of watches. The format will be digibeta or HDV. With stills macro work I would normally use extension tubes at the back of the lens because they are cheap and have no optical elements thus keeping good image quality. Does anyone know if such things exist for video cameras? Help

 

Peter

 

 

Hi,

 

Centuary make some fine diopters, not that cheap however.

 

Stephen

[chuck colburn]

I'm shooting a doc on watches and I need to be able to shoot macro work of watches. The format will be digibeta or HDV. With stills macro work I would normally use extension tubes at the back of the lens because they are cheap and have no optical elements thus keeping good image quality. Does anyone know if such things exist for video cameras? Help

 

Peter

 

Good morning Peter,

 

Since you're going to be working with profssional camera equipment you will probally have matte box rods sticking out front of the lens. An old movie camera trick was to use a longer focal length lens on the camera thus ensuring the least amount of curveture of field at the film plane and then mounting a large film format lens in front of that lens. Sort of like a highly corrected diopter. This also has the advangted of giving you much longer working distance than using a macro lens or a close up diopter, thus making your lighting setup easier. We use to use old Kodak Aero Ektars that were used on 10 by 10 inch roll film cameras as they were available at surplus stores for about $20.00. But I would think any longer focal length large format lens would do just fine.

 

Chuck

[chuck colburn]

Good morning Peter,

 

Since you're going to be working with profssional camera equipment you will probally have matte box rods sticking out front of the lens. An old movie camera trick was to use a longer focal length lens on the camera thus ensuring the least amount of curveture of field at the film plane and then mounting a large film format lens in front of that lens. Sort of like a highly corrected diopter. This also has the advangted of giving you much longer working distance than using a macro lens or a close up diopter, thus making your lighting setup easier. We use to use old Kodak Aero Ektars that were used on 10 by 10 inch roll film cameras as they were available at surplus stores for about $20.00. But I would think any longer focal length large format lens would do just fine.

 

Chuck

 

Just to make this a little clearer the secondary lens is not attached to the camera lens, just mounted on the matte box rods. This allows you to move to and fro to achieve the needed magnification ratio. Expouser stop is still controled by the camera lens.

[Michael Nash]

Usually there's an optical adjustment on the back of the lens which allows macro shooting. This is cerainly the case with every ENG style lens I've ever seen; I don't know how things like digiprimes work, if you were to use those.

 

Keep in mind that while the macro-focusing element on an ENG lens lets you focus very close, there is still a limitation to the magnification you can get relative to the diameter of the lens' front element. If you want to get tiny details within a watchface, for example, you need a lens with a smaller front element. Probe lenses are designed for this.

 

You might check with Innovision Optics for their different video mount lenses.

[Nick Mulder]

We use to use old Kodak Aero Ektars that were used on 10 by 10 inch roll film cameras as they were available at surplus stores for about $20.00.

 

Are they the radioactive ones ?

[chuck colburn]

Are they the radioactive ones ?

 

Hello Nick,

 

So far as being radioactive I don't know about that. Their main use was on a large format roll film camera that was hand held in flying aircraft. As I said you can use most any large still camera format lens for this purpose. There are lots of three to nine hundred mm process type lenses that were used for photo repro work for sale on ebay at cheap prices. These lenses were designed for relatively close working ratios ( 1.1 2.1 3.1 etc. ) and are corrected for flat field and chromatic abberations making them very good for this application. Look under Zeiss, Gorez, Rodenstock etc. Another trick was to mount a sandard focal length lens backwards on a set of bellows. Since you will be working in the video domain you won't even have to calculate expouser times for the bellow extension as you can judge it on the monitor.

 

Chuck