Sunday, August 11, 2013

Can a 100mm macro lens be used for landscape and family portraits?

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I'm thinking of buying a 100mm Canon macro lens. But I also need a lens to take some family photos of 50 or so people (either wide angle or from far away). Can I use the same 100mm macro lens for both? Any pros/cons?


Answer
A 100mm macro lens on any Canon dSLR with an APS-C format sensor (any non-professional Canon digital SLR let's say) will have a crop factor of 1.6x. That means that a 100mm lens on a Canon EOS 300D Digital Rebel (just a random example) would actually be equivalent to a 160mm lens. In general, that focal length isn't going to be very useful for wide landscape photography or photos of large groups, but it would likely take very nice portraits of 1-3 people. That focal length is often considered part of the nice ranges of portrait lenses (around 85mm-180mm).

In a word though - "Nah" - that's not a good lens for both applications that you're interested in. Even at a straight 100mm you probably won't find an experienced photographer who will bless anything over, say, 35mm on the high end (no crop factor) for landscape/large group photos. On an APC-S sensor that would be about 17mm-18mm, which is quite common on zoom lenses now.

What happens if I do the "reverse prime" technique on an already macro-dedicated lens?







I have a 100mm Canon macro lens, and I was wondering what would happen if I did this technique on the lens. Would it reverse the macro back to a non-magnified view? I know that a lot of people use this technique to turn a normal lens into a makeshift macro lens, so I was wondering. I have seen some amazingly good quality macro images taken with a regular lens reversed, so if this would work on a macro lens would the quality be even better?


Answer
It won't make your macro lens do anything it doesn't already do.

The only issue is where the lens will focus. Other than that, it is just like using any other lens for the purpose. Most reverse-prime work is done with wide angle or standard lenses, not telephotos.

You could put a reversed prime on the end of the macro... that will work. I've done 28mm and 50mm on 105mm, but the focus point is right up against the object with a 28mm. Makes lighting a challenge.




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