CLOSE-UP PHOTOGRAPHY

Commonly, lenses will focus to infinity, but they won’t enable you to focus on close-up objects, which makes photographing small things difficult. We tested out the two official lenses. The 6mm was a surprise since it’ll focus down to just a few millimetres from the front of the lens. That’s not very useful, though, because you can’t illuminate anything so close to the lens, although focused to a practical minimum distance of 10mm, the field of view is 15mm wide. The 16mm lens is more typical, having a minimum focus of about 55mm, and at that distance the horizontal field of view is 22mm.

Like most C/CS lenses, the official lenses have filter threads at the front which means that you can screw on a close-up filter, which is a misnomer because it’s a simple lens that enables you to focus on closer objects. They come in various strengths, measured in diopters. 1, 2, 4 and sometimes 10 diopter filters are common and can be bought in sets of the three or four strengths, which can used singly or in combination. The 16mm lens needs filters with a 37mm thread. We tested out the 16mm lens with a combination of a 2 and 4 diopter close-up filter – because we had them at hand – and were able to focus down to 11mm, at which point the horizontal field of view was about 5mm.

Yet another option is to use C/CS extension tubes, which separate the lens further from the sensor, thereby decreasing the minimum focussing distance.