Lens comparison for macro work

Janer_2 wrote:

gardenersassistant wrote:

RazorSharpWO wrote:

If super-close focus is your real goal, take up look at Gardner's Assistant's blog, he has a lot of experience shooting a huge variety of subjects, almost all of which is greater than 1:1.

Thanks, but even if the OP is interested in going beyond 1:1 I think he should steer clear of my stuff, for two reasons he mentions in this post above:

• He writes "This post is still more about choosing the right lens of the available selection. That's why I want actual user experience to aid me in my own decision making". I have no relevant experience with any of the lenses he mentions.
• He writes "However, I am concerned with capturing fine detail. Like many I'm possibly cursed that way." I produce invertebrate images that are devoid of fine detail and produce flower images at a small size where any fine detail that was captured is not visible.

And for flowers etc there is another reason: I use two techniques , both of which are unlikely to be available to the OP because of the lenses he is interested in and by implication the camera systems he is interested in.

I believe, as you and others have clearly explained, what equipment would be suitable depends on what exactly the OP will be wanting to do, or more appropriately perhaps at this stage given the OP's uncertainty about that, what range of subjects, sizes etc he wishes to explore to work out what he will be wanting to do. In either case, my approach and the type of kit I use isn't it! (IMO)

I did have a look at your photos and just wanted to know I appreciated them and found them very good, I'm not sure this is exactly what I'll be trying to do as you say, but they were excellent!

Thank you.

Also, thank you for taking the time to reply, despite not having experience with the lenses in question.

On reflection, there is one thing in the top post that I can provide some thoughts on, namely

Janer_2 wrote:

Also, I mainly use a D800 and have the possibility to adapt them to a A7 II if I feel adventurous.

You have expressed an interest in the Sigma 105. I have a Sigma 105 DG Macro HSM. I have no useful information about how sharp it is, in either relative or absolute terms, because I have only used it for brief experiments, but I do have an A7ii. The Sigma is Canon EF mount. I can attach it to the A7ii with a Sigma MC-11 EF to E adapter (the lens in not on Sigma's list of supported lenses for the MC-11). Here are some approximate measurements I did this morning, with some personal opinions (open to interpretation/debate I'm sure) in the final two columns and some related thoughts below.

With the Sigma 105 on the A7ii IBIS is disabled. The Sigma OIS works. I did some comparisons at 1:1 and 1:2 with OIS on and off. The images are in this album in Flickr and show three attempts with OIS off and then three attempts with OIS on, at various shutter speeds. (They are only 1300 pixels high as it is the relative sharpness we are concerned with not the absolute sharpness, for which full size and information about processing would be required, as well as tripod or flash to optimise capture sharpness/detail.)

For both autofocusing macro lenses I have used (MFT Olympus 60mm macro and Sigma 105 as above) I found autofocus of decreasing usefulness as magnification got towards 1:1. That is one of the reasons why for over 10 years rather than using macro lenses I used close-up lenses on telezoom lenses, with which autofocus worked usably fast (and very accurately) right down to scenes a fairly small number of millimetres wide. As with macro lenses of course, how fast and how accurate the autofocus was depended on the scene, light levels, scene size, amount of hand-shaking etc.

In fact the only reason I switched to using a (manual focus) macro setup is that I can get greater depth of field than with my autofocusing close-up lens setups, especially for small subjects. Otherwise, a close-up lens on a small sensor bridge camera is fine for what I do. This sort of image wouldn't be of interest to you of course because of the lack of detail, but it's good enough for my purposes. (I think close-up lenses are sometimes a bit under-rated.) The first five of these used a Raynox 150 close-up lens on 1/2.3" sensor Panasonic bridge cameras. Close-up lenses can also work well on ILC telezooms, in my case a Canon 55-250 on APS-C and a 45-175 on MFT (last two images below).

APS-C 55-250 with Raynox 150

MFT 45-175 with Raynox 150

The thing that has enhanced the usefulness of a macro setup for me, at up to 8X magnification hand-held, has been focus peaking. Like autofocus, how well it works depends on the circumstances, but I do find it very useful. That said, it doesn't work some of the time but I find I can generally focus OK using the A7ii/sii/rii even for scenes where focus peaking doesn't work adequately, or at all.