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best Macro lens setup for Jewelry

Started Apr 17, 2014 | Questions thread
photonius Veteran Member • Posts: 6,895
Re: best Macro lens setup for Jewelry

pbpawn wrote:

Just wanted to start off by saying I have very little experience in photography, but I'm a quick learner.

I work for a pawn shop, and recently started posting jewelry online. The setup we have is a Canon Rebel XTi (DS126151) with a canon EFS 17-85mm lens. It says macro on the lens but the pictures for our jewelry just isn't coming out sharp enough. Is there a cheap variation, or bang for the buck lens I should buy? or maybe some adapters that would fix my issue?... any help is appreciated. Also we are using a light-box for the jewelry so lighting isn't an issue.

Thanks

One point to consider, you don't specify how the images are not coming out sharp enough. At high magnification, the depth of field (DOF) is getting very narrow (doesn't matter what lens you use), so perhaps the reason for some of the unsharpness you observe is that not everything is in focus? Alternatively, if you stop down the lens a lot to get a lot of DOF, (say f32), you are actually running into diffraction problems, any lens will get unsharp when the aperture is too small. A cut-off point for APS-C is around f16, see http://www.photozone.de/canon-eos/513-canon60f28apsc?start=1

the canon 60mm macro is probably the best bet. The Raynox lenses are good, but perhaps give you more magnification than you need, and make things a bit more difficult to arrange, as the focus range is limited.

Anyway, given you are producing them for the web, super high resolution is not necessary.

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