Macro Trick: Reverse Your 50mm Lens

Now I don’t remember when I first heard about doing this, but if you reverse your nifty 50, or 50 mm lens, you can create macro like shots. How well does it work to reverse your 50mm prime lens and what do you need to watch out for when you do? Well I quickly tried it out and the results for a first few shots weren’t half that bad.

Now I have see instructions where you can just remove the lens from your digital SLR camera, flip it around and hold it to the camera body. This is the approached I just tried. When you do this you of course loose your auto-focus ability as well as any f-stop control. In fact, my camera just displayed 00 as my aperture value.

The subject I choose for this quick little macro trick was a bunch of Gerber daisies I recently bought Robyn. Yes, I do buy flowers for just cause.

Beautiful flowers aren’t they? Gerbers are one of my personal favorites actually, and they seem to last a decent amount of time too. So what do they look like if I reverse (or flip) my Canon EF 50mm f1.8 lens?

Not a terribly bad shot; hand held, outdoors with a breeze. I played around with the ISO from 100 to 400 to get a decent shutter speed. I assume since there is no aperture ring on the lens, it would stay full open at f1.8. The colour is a bit off too I noticed, which I tried to correct using Lightroom.

The draw back to doing it this way? You expose your camera’s internal workings, such as the mirror, sensor and such to dust and whatever else might be floating around. After all, you are holding the lens backwards against the camera and it doesn’t create a great ’seal’. I read over at Digital-Photography-School (dps) you can actually buy a reverse lens mount for your lenses.

The other option I remember hearing about during a brief photocamp, is you could probably hold up your nifty 50 lens with another lens that is attached to your camera body. I have not tried this yet, but it helps ensure you keep the dust out of your camera body, it still exposes the back of your 50mm lens though, so be careful.