About a year ago, I decided I wanted to start playing with taking close-up images again. It’s something I’d played with when I studied Fine Art at University, and again, as I started to experiment as a photographer. I thought this could be a good starting point to grow from, as it was for me previously.
To get going, I purchased a vintage set of camera bellows off ebay designed to take M42 thread lenses. I chose this, is there are many adapters for other lens types available for pennies. I had done a little reading about using enlarger lenses for close up photography and decided to settle on a few vintage Soviet-Era optics from Ukraine and an adapter to allow me to fit them to the bellows.
Two of the lenses are 50mm, and another is a 75mm focal length. Apart from looking kinda cool, in a Lomo-meets-Soviet-meets-vintage sort of way, each lens proved itself pretty useless, which all sorts of weird optical wrongness causing strange effects in images taken with them. This is all well and good, if that’s what you’re after, but it wasn’t really what I wanted. Lucky for me, a Nikon-branded enlarger lens popped up on ebay for not many pennies.
To test the Nikon lens, I took some close-up pictures of some stuff I was about to make a sandwich out of…
So that’s where I left it… for around another year.
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