Yum!

Yum is a project that I have wanted to do for a while now and I am finally getting around to producing the images. If you have visited the site before, you know I have a great interest in Macro photography.

Macro photography is, in a nutshell, items photographed larger than life size. Some of the images on my macro page range from a 1:1 ratio, or life size, up to magnification ratios of up to 8X life size.

I recently acquired a vintage Nikon Macro lens. It is a 105 F4 Bellows. It is about half the length of a regular 105mm macro lens. This was accomplished because of its purpose. It was designed specifically to be used with a bellows attachment, so it has no internal focusing mechanism. In addition, it doesn’t have an automatic diaphragm to open or close the aperture. All this saves size and weight.

Bellows mount between the front of the camera and the rear of the lens. By moving the lens away from the body and film plane, you increase the magnification. The bellows allow you to change this distance easily. The downside is it is not exactly an easily wielded setup. You need a tripod and for best results a cable release and studio lighting helps enormously. It is also difficult to utilize outdoors.

This short lens was the first macro lens Nikon produced and also has a killer reputation for being one of the sharpest lenses that the company has ever made. At a minimum aperture of F32, it has tremendous depth of field capabilities. It was produced from 1970 to 1974 and only about 7,000 of them were ever made.

Once the lens is mounted to the bellows, you adjust the aperture ring wide open to focus. Then once you use the bellows to focus the image, you rotate the aperture stop ring to the desired aperture, then move the aperture ring to meet the stop. Then you fire the shutter capturing the image.

These images were shot with a Nikon D7000 DSLR with a PB-4 Bellows attachment, the 105mm lens, with a cable release. I use Bogen Tripods and heads, and Interfit studio lighting.  Interfit made great studio lighting but unfortunately they ceased to exist due to Covid and the difficulties in sourcing materials to produce their products during the pandemic.

Nikon equipment excels in many areas. One the things I most appreciate about their gear is the fact that when the world changed from manual focus to auto focus, they kept their lens mount the same. This created many difficulties for them, but it has allowed users to stave off planned obsolescence to a degree.

Most Nikon lenses and camera bodies will have some functionality across the historical spectrum. For example the lens and bellows I am using were able to be mounted on a digital DSLR, and although many features are not compatible, the lens/bellows combo can be mounted and used with current technology to produce images.

A vintage Nikon manual focus  lens can be mounted on the new digital camera bodies but you lose auto focus and the lens doesn’t have the electrical contacts to mate with the camera for exposure information, but if you have a light meter, you can calculate exposures and then focus manually. You can inversely mount new Nikon lenses on old camera bodies, and basically the same rules apply but in reverse. There are always exceptions, but for the most part there is incredible flexibility in the system.

I hope you enjoy the series of images as much as I enjoy creating them. I look to add more as time goes by and as I find more tasty treats to photograph in new ways. I just have to keep myself from eating them all!