Best lense for Product Photography

[Maira Parveen]

Hello Everyone,

I have Canon 1100 d camera with lenses;

- Canon 18:55 mm
- Tamron 70-300 mm

I want to do shooting of Jewellery and small objects with close-ups.

Please advice me some tips, i tried myself but pictures i got is very blur and not clear.

Thanks.

 

[Jeff15]

Hello Maira and welcome, you may need a Macro lens, good luck

 

[Fujidave]

Hello Everyone,

I have Canon 1100 d camera with lenses;

- Canon 18:55 mm
- Tamron 70-300 mm

I want to do shooting of Jewellery and small objects with close-ups.

Please advice me some tips, i tried myself but pictures i got is very blur and not clear.

Thanks.

Hi Maira, when I had my Canon 1100D I had the 100mm EF f2/8 Macro IS L USM lens. A fantastic lens when I had and used it.

Canon EF 100mm f2.8L Macro IS USM Lens | Wex Photo Video

 

[Maira Parveen]

Hello Everyone,

I have Canon 1100 d camera with lenses;

- Canon 18:55 mm
- Tamron 70-300 mm

I want to do shooting of Jewellery and small objects with close-ups.

Please advice me some tips, i tried myself but pictures i got is very blur and not clear.

Thanks.

Hi Maira, when I had my Canon 1100D I had the 100mm EF f2/8 Macro IS L USM lens. A fantastic lens when I had and used it.

Canon EF 100mm f2.8L Macro IS USM Lens | Wex Photo Video

Thanks Fujidave for your reply.
But that lense is very expensive, can you suggest me any cheapest option?

 

[Designer]

..can you suggest me any cheapest option?

Extension tubes.

What is an Extension Tube? - Photography Life

 

[VidThreeNorth]

Can you upload an example of what pictures you have? The Canon 18-55 should focus to around 10" which might be close enough for some things. As far as being blurry, well, you will need a lot of light to use a small enough aperture. Your depth of field is going to be very short.

 

[Designer]

You will also need a tripod.

Extension tubes (or macro lens), good light, tripod, patience.

 

[dxqcanada]

But that lense is very expensive, can you suggest me any cheapest option?

EF-S 35mm f/2.8 Macro IS STM

 

[jcdeboever]

Tokina 100mm F/2.8 Macro AT-X Pro D Lens For Canon EF Mount {55}

 

[TCampbell]

You really want a proper 1:1 scale macro lens. I used to use the EF-S 60mm f/2.8 Macro USM. Canon now has an EF-S 35mm macro with a built-in macro light.

There are lenses that will have “macro” in the name, but aren’t true life-size 1:1 scale macro lenses (often these are 1:3 or 1:4 scale). In other words you can’t get quite as close and the product wont be as large. If you are doing jewelry, you need 1:1.

Depth of field will be fairly thin at very close distances. You can use a higher f-stop (e.g. f/16 or f/22) but the lens will become “diffraction limited” — which means that while things look pretty good, very carefully inspection will reveal very slight compromise in sharpness.

To get around this, you can use “focus stacking”. Focus stacking involves shooting a lot of images of the same object ... each at a different distance. Commonly you use a tripod and a gadget called a “focus rail” (focus rails aren’t particularly expensive ... generally less than $100). You can take a shot, nudge the camera forward on the focus rail by about a millimeter or two, take another shot, and just keep repeating until you have shots from the from to the back of the subject. All this is merged using focus-stacking software on the computer and you end up with a tack-sharp subject from front to back.



But what if all this is still too expensive? There is a cheaper way (but keep in mind... everything has a trade-off).

You can use something called “close-up diopters” (sometimes called close-up filters). This is like wearing “reading glasses” to let you focus closer than normally possible ... except for your camera lens. It installs like a filter in that the front of your lens has threads on it (Canon 18-55mm lens has 58mm thread diameter).

For that lens, you’d get the Canon 250D close-up diopter. Canon’s close-up diopters (and ONLY Canon’s) use a dual-element design (it’s two pieces of glass instead of one) arranged in a configuration called an “achromatic doublet”. A normal close-up diopter is just one lens (like a magnifying glass). Those are sharp in the middle, but sharpness degrades and you get color fringing near the edges. Canon uses the 2nd element to correct for the optical problems caused by a single element design. They cost about $100-ish. This is a lot cheaper than buying a macro lens. A true macro lens is better and more versatile, but on a budget, this is a cheaper way to do close-up photography.



As others have mentioned, you can also use “extension tubes”. These position the lens farther away which has the result of shifting the entire focus range of the lens much closer (but the lens will no longer focus to infinity with the extension tube installed.). If you use extension tubes, you want tubes that have the electronic contacts to allow the camera and lens to communicate. Canon’s extension tube reports is presence to the camera so it knows how to adapt focusing (otherwise auto-focus doesn’t work correctly). You can still manually focus. But there are tubes with no electronic contacts. Those tubes don’t let the camera communicate with the lens which means you can’t control the lens’ aperture blades (and that’s a problem). Manual tubes should only be used with completely manual lenses (some lenses have an aperture ring on the lens body and requires no electronics to control them.)

 

[cooltouch]

If you don't have much to spend and don't mind manual focus, one macro I love and often recommend is the Tamron 52B 90mm f/2.5. It's a 1:2 macro lens, but can be brought down to 1:1 with extension tubes or Tamron's dedicated 2x teleconverter.

There are other manual focus macro options, most of which provide only 1:2 magnification. There's a Vivitar or Tokina 90mm I believe that gets down to 1:1 and then there's also the rather well-regarded Kiron-made 105mm f/2.8 macro that appears in a variety of names, which also gets down to 1:1. I have one with a Vivitar Series 1 label on it. Lester Dine is also another brand name you'll find it in.

As for mounting it to your EOS, the Tamron is an Adaptall-2 system lens, which is to say it takes a variety of interchangeable mounts. I believe there are EOS mounts available for Adaptall-2 lenses. With regards to the Kiron 100/2.8, this lens was available in a variety of dedicated mounts, most of which can be adapted to use with your EOS. Nikon, Pentax, Olympus mount lenses can be mounted to an EOS with an appropriate adapter, which can be found on eBay for reasonable sums. Canon FD and Minolta MC/MD mounts will not work on EOS cameras because infinity focus cannot be obtained. However, since you're doing macro work, you can buy mounts to use these lenses on EOS cameras that contain a corrective element so infinity focus can be attained, but these elements can also be removed from the adapter, which means you now have a lens that is good for close up work only. With a 100mm lens, this means that maximum distance from your camera will be about 6 feet. Which should be plenty for jewelry photography.

 

[santino]

EF 2.5 50mm compact macro. Multiply by 1.6 and you have a slight tele lens.

 

[TCampbell]

EF 2.5 50mm compact macro. Multiply by 1.6 and you have a slight tele lens.

That's a 1:2 scale lens (max magnification is 1/2 size) ... not a true 1:1 scale macro. To bring it to 1:1 scale requires their "life size" adapter ... but that puts the price at more than the 60mm macro (which was already a 1:1 scale lens).