Eyepiece Macros

Now that you have an eyepiece attached to your camera the fun begins!

First, you’ll need to experiment with the zoom control on your camera to get the magnification levels you want. On the A70 I found that it worked best when zoomed all of the way in (optical, not digital zoom). The Nikon 4500 seemed to be just the opposite. I suspect it relates to how the camera’s lenses are arranged in relationship to the lens of the eyepiece.

If you aren’t zoomed in you’ll still get nice shots (at lower magnification levels) but most likely you’ll see vignetting like in the left photo below (easy to crop out). Both photos are very close views of the same strawberry.

If you click both of the images above and examine them full sized you may notice something else: depth of field…or lack thereof. As mentioned earlier when zoomed in this close the amount of the subject in focus becomes very small.

Here is an extreme example taken with a 10mm eyepiece. There’s just a dinky little area in the middle that is in focus—everything else drops out of focus quite rapidly. Also, even though the camera was zoomed in all of the way, the smaller diameter of the 10mm opening caused vignetting. You need a lot of patience to get a good shot at this level of magnification.

«Attaching the Eyepiece

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Magnification and Aperture»