I’m fascinated with shooting tiny things - I guess that might explain my penchant for shooting objects & trinkets that I can put on my desktop. I would love to shoot even smaller items, but unfortunately, I don’t have a macro lens.

It’s a good good thing then that Brian Larter wrote a little post recently on reverse lens photography. What in the world is that? In a nutshell, it involves mounting a lens backward on your camera (or on another lens) to get a makeshift macro lens.

He discusses methods of mounting a lens backward, magnification levels, and other things, but the one topic I was really thankful he tackled was controlling the aperture on your lens. No, this isn’t a problem if you’ve got a lens with manual aperture control on it - but it is when you’re dealing with EF or EF-S lenses. If you’re reading this Brian, you’re a lifesaver.

After reading this, it took me all of two seconds to whip out my camera and try this out. One of my first shots was this abstract piece. Can you tell what it is?

I moved on to other items, and soon decided to play with my makeshift macro lens in my makeshift studio. Several hours and even more shots later, I ended up with the shots of tiny things in my gallery.

So, what do you think?

Tags: macro photography, reverse lens photography, tiny things, DIY, Brian Larter, brianlarter.com