Lens Summary
Those are some of my main considerations when choosing a
macro lens. I don’t care how heavy or bulky a lens is. Carting
these things around is second nature to me now. It is easy to see
that if we insist on having all of the above points in a single lens
we quickly are down to almost none. In fact the one lens I have
that is sharp, fast, has a long focus throw, goes to 1:1, and has
APO is the Voigtlander 125mm f/2.5 APO-Lanthar. Even better
are the two new Zeiss APO lenses, which while very expensive,
have it all.
No other lens has all of these features without adding diopters or
settling for a short focus throw, etc. It is no wonder that this lens is
in great demand and very expensive. The Nikon 105mm VR
macro is pretty good as well in terms of having many of the
important features.
Please refer to the second book in this series which is on
lenses. There you will find photos, specs on many lenses that
are useful for macro, close-up, and mini-landscape
photography.
The Lens Is the Thing
Lenses are the heart of photography, IMO, and certainly a good
sharp lens is required for decent focus stacking. And lenses can be
expensive, to say the least. Fortunately for macro and close-up
photography, where we must focus manually anyway, we can use
older lenses which are often readily available at reasonable prices.
Today everyone wants autofocus lenses, so for those of us who
require manual focusing, bargains are all around us.
The kind of lens you need depends on the kind of close- up
photographing you intend to do. Are you just taking single
photographs or do you want to focus stack a series of photos?
While focus stacking can also be used for landscape and
intermediate distance photography, much of it tends to be done in
close-up and macro photography.
Speaking very generally, most macro and close-up work is done
with short telephoto lenses rather than wide angle lenses.
Traditionally the 50mm lens has been set as the standard or
“normal lens and any lenses smaller than that (24mm, 35mm, etc.)
