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Hi, I'm Dustin Abbott, and I'm here today to give you a quick review on an inexpensive way to do macro photography, even if you don't have the budget, or maybe you don't do macro often enough to justify purchasing a dedicated macro lens
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Now, I'm going to do this review today on Canon RF because most recently these velo extension tubes have become available in Canon RF mount and their kind of deluxe auto focus version
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And so I'm reviewing it there, though I will note that these are available for a variety of other platforms
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It should function pretty similarly for reasons that I'll detail in just a moment
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So the premise of extension tubes is this. Your minimum focus distance is determined by how close any kind of gas
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given lens can focus to a particular subject. And so in the case of this Canon RF 50mm F1.8
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a very inexpensive lens, about $180 right now, you can focus down as closely as 30 centimeters
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or right under a foot. So obviously that's useful. It gives you a 0.25 times magnification
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which is of some use. And I've also demonstrated this using the popular, more expensive
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but kind of a general purpose, popular lens, and that is the 24 to 105 millimeter F1.5
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4 LIS. And so in that case, the minimum, the maximum magnification is 0.24 times natively
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So just a little bit lower. So the premise of extension tubes is pretty simple
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Instead of that typical minimum focus distance, they will space out. They'll move the optical
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path forward. And so where the lens can now focus down at a closer distance, which increases
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the magnification, though at the cost of being to focus out to infinity. Now I will detail that one of the
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major disadvantages of extension tubes is found right here in this, and that is that you do
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lose infinity focus. So you basically have to mount them and use them for macro type photography
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and even in doing that, depending on how much extension tube you've got attached here, you will find
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that you're limited to maybe a fairly narrow range of focus that, you know, if I stack these
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extension tubes as I've got them here at the moment, more on that in just a moment. But with this
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50 millimeter, I've got a range of focus. It's maybe only about this much. You know
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know, 15 centimeters, six inches or so, and anything outside of that, I can't focus
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And so it does give you a little more constricted play area, so to speak, than a dedicated
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macro lens But the advantage is is that as you move that optical path further and further forward it allows you to focus closer and closer And so if the native magnification looks like this I can add on the 12 millimeter extension tube and get this close
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And if I add the 20 millimeter extension tube, I can go to this level of magnification
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And if I stack the tube to give me the equivalent of a 32 millimeter extension, I can go all the way to this, which is well past a one-to-one macro level
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And so obviously, that's going to give you a huge amount of versatility. and the performance is really going to depend on the lens itself
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And so, as I said, I tested it with both the RF50mm F1.8 STM
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and I found that it performed better than what the 24 to 105 did in this kind of macro range
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Now, extension tubes tend to be relatively inexpensive, and that's for the simple reason is that there is no optics in here
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It really is a glorified spacer. However, it has to be designed to where things are bayoneting on nice and tight
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and so that you don't end up with wobble. And also, in this case, it does care. the electronic contacts and so that you can continue to have autofocus. The performance of the
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auto focus I found varied a bit. It was quite good with the 24 to 105. I had no issues at all
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It was a little less good with the RF 50 millimeter F1.8 and that comes down to the fact that
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the focus on the 24 to 105 is better period than what the RF lens, the 50 millimeter lens is
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And so again, you know, your mileage is going to vary depending on what you put in front of the extension tubes
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In this case, these are made of a lightweight metal housing that is lightweight enough to where it feels somewhat plastic-y
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Maybe, in fact, it is a metal-coated actual plastic here. So very lightweight, we're talking about somewhere between 25 and 35 grams for each one, depending on them
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But they do click into place and bayonet on fairly tightly. There is a little bit of play there, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of wobble up and down
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Though some have pointed out, I looked at some of the user feedback and some that are using heavier lenses like, say, the RF 100 to 500, they're going to find a little bit more flex, particularly if they're not using the actual tripod mount. If you're using the tripod mount, it helps to solve that problem. Now, in the case with both of the lenses that I used, they're both lightweight enough that it was no problem at all. Everything is nice and tight, good and rigid there. And so performance was just fine. So how about the optical performance? Let's dive in and take a quick look at some photos and see what you can
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can achieve by using this solution for macro. So as noted, your performance is really going to depend on the lens that you mount in front of the extension tubes
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And so in this case the 50mm F1 gives both a higher degree of magnification than the RF 24 to 105 But I also found that it delivered better contrast kind of a better macro performance As you can see it marred by less aberrations
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If you stop it down a little bit, which I recommend that you do. Depth of the field becomes extremely shallow
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As you can see here, that even on the front of the spotmatic, I mean, you have the front is in focus
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and the shallow grooves are not in focus any longer. So overall, with the 50 millimeter
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I was actually quite pleased with my level of macro performance. I mean, that's a very nice detail that's rendered there
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Again, this is on just the top of the camera on the little bit of dial. Some chromatic aberrations, but, you know, that's part for the course of this lens
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But overall, like on these shiny textures, I mean, you can see I'm able to produce a really shallow depth of field
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And also, you can note that while there is some chromatic aberrations, kind of the grain of the metal is really nicely defined
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And there's nothing that's spoiling that image at all. Here's another shot here
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And so this is stopped down a little bit just to increase depth of field. And you can see, again, a really nice detail on the metal
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If I open things up a bit, you can see that the depth of field becomes really, really shallow
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almost unusably shallow because of the high level of magnification, a little more chromatic aberration
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and you can also see more of this swirl effect. And so I will note this, that if there is some kind of optical defect like this
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stacking a lot of extension tubes will potentially magnify that a little bit, as I believe is the case here
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and also just the high magnification of the very shallow depth of field
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something that you really wouldn't see natively on the lens. Here's an image I thought turned out really good
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This is that F3.5, and so once again, it's very credible in the macro area
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Good detail here, and the textures look nice, just kind of a nice mood to the image
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Also here, a very shallow depth of field. We'll take a look at this
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This is at F4. So it goes to show you that even stopping down as far as F4, depth of field at this macro distance is really, really shallow
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You know, it's not at the level of my top level macro lenses, but that's pretty nice as is here
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You can just see really nice fine detail there. And, you know, for a budget approach to macro, that's pretty awesome looking
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Now, I was less impressed with the performance up close of the 24 to 1. As you can see here, it's just, it's not really resolving as highly
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I also felt like that there is lower contrast in situations, more aberrations here
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Again if I shooting at F4 it a very shallow depth of field because we shooting at 105 millimeters which is fairly long and at this high level of magnification So you know even on this guitar even everything else here is completely blurred out but you can just see that the contrast is not it not competing with any kind of true macro lens
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This image turned out pretty good. I thought, again, it's the contrast is not competing with the best macro lenses
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but, you know, it's a credible looking image. And one final one here, you know, looking pretty good here
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This is maybe one of the better examples. Chromatic aberrations are not as bad, and the bouquet is actually really nice from the lens
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This is at F8. And so stopping down may help, and as you can see at these very close distances, you're still getting a very blurred out background
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even with a smaller aperture like that. And as we see, it allowed the lens to perform at a little bit higher level at this close focus distance
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So again, obviously, the performance varies a little bit from lens to lens
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but I was actually quite pleasantly surprised with how good the performance was on the inexpensive nifty 50
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And really, I think that this offers kind of a best case scenario if you're looking for an inexpensive way to achieve macro because the lens is inexpensive
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And these extension tubes only run about $80 U.S. dollars. And so not expensive at all
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And between the two of them and the ability to then stack them, you really get a lot of versatility on how much macro you need for a particular situation
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And so if you don't mind a little bit of mounting and dismounting, you can. and end up with a perfectly fine performance
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I did also note at B&H photo looking at user reviews, some people were saying that they locked up the camera on their Canon EOS R5
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I don't know if there's been a change to this or just updates to the R5 itself
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but I tested on the Canon R5. I had zero issues, no lockup type issues
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I retained autofocus without any kind of problem. So I'm not quite sure what they were alluding to
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but I did not experience that issue at all. So at the end of the day, if you can't afford a macro lens or you don't do macro
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often enough to invest in it. Consider extension tubes. They are a cheap way
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to get you some macro-type performance. And in this case, I found that
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you know, other than the typical limitations of extension tubes, that these velo, very inexpensive extension tubes
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works just fine for what I wanted to accomplish. I'm Dustin Abbott. If you look in the description down below
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I have from buying links there if you'd like to purchase these for yourself
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There's also linkage to follow myself or Craig on social media or to check out our new channel
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at the Lighten TV. You can also find linkage to purchase channel merchandise to become a patron. And of course, if you haven't already, please click that
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