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Step Up/Step Down Rings
By sirsnapalot | January 27, 2010
In my insane drive to push macro as far as I can and as cheaply as possible, I bought these two sets of rings from Fotodiox on eBay. Together, all 14 rings cost me a total of $15 + $4 shipping.
Step Up/Down Rings
What they do is step up, or down, from diameters of 77mm to 49mm. They allow you to attach lenses of various diameters with filters of various diameters. Step up attaches a smaller filter to a larger lens, and step down attaches a larger filter to a smaller lens.
In extreme cases, such as attaching a 49mm filter to a 77mm lens, you would obviously seriously restrict your field of view. But with all these here, you have tons of options, and in photography, anything bad (restricted field of view) can be made good in some cases.
For me, I have an old Canon FD-52mm adapter mount that allows me to mount my old Canon FD mount lenses from centuries ago (OK, the 80′s and early 90′s) to backwards on my camera to do macro work. Lenses work fairly well in reverse, and they do the opposite- wide angle becomes a telephoto. The wider, the higher the magnification when flipped around. The adapter screws into a 52mm filter ring on the lens and the other side mates with the old Canon FD mount. The problem is, my old lenses had various filter sizes. So, I found these rings and solved the problem (and one of them was used in creating the bug’s eye picture next image over).
Also, I took the stepping rings photograph in my new light box with white plexiglass (1′ square piece), and I really like how professional it came out looking like a real product advertisement photo. I’ll have to post some pictures of my setup sometime in the near future.
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Topics: Gear, Macro, Tips | 1 Comment »
March 18th, 2010 at 23:59
Great tips, thanks!
I’m having trouble with filters obstructing the FOV on my wide-angle 21mm (92 degrees FOV) maybe stepping-up to a 52mm or 55mm filter might do the trick?
I look forward to your future topic about PhotoAcute software. I’ve been testing it out & this takes photography to the next level! (Super-resolution, extended focus, HDR, moving object removal, true noise removal… it’s all there in one product!!) Theres a book about it too on Amazon (Photographic Multishot Techniques).