jaymatt Loc: Alexandria, Indiana

A camera club friend gave me a set of manual extension tubes for my Canon (she has moved on to mirrorless), and I have no experience whatsoever with them. I plan to use them with my 50mm f 1.8.

Can anyone with experience using them give me any pointers as to their best use, with what kinds of subjects, and how to best manipulate them? Any positive advice will be greatly appreciated.

Zooman 1

They let you get closer, so my advice is to put one on and shoot away. It will depend on how well they match your lens: will they allow auto functions, or does everything go to manual. Also, you can stack them together for even greater close-up. Best I can say, not knowing the brand.

frankraney Loc: Clovis, Ca.

They are tied to get closer to subject. Closer equals more magnification. Here is a good article.


https://digital-photography-school.com/extension-tubes-close-up-photography-lesson-2/

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

The EF Canon branded tubes pass all the electronics to the lens, including auto focus control. So, if you have to focus via LiveView, you need subjects that lend themselves to a tripod and working from the camera's back (assuming DSLR). They need to pass the signal to control the aperture, or they'll be truly worthless for a DSLR where the aperture closes electronically.

I have my extension tubes in my bag nearly every trip. The 12 and 25 just mount to each other in the bag, and I pick which I need for the situation onsite. The 50mm is workable, but about the shortest focal length with a tube because of how close you need to be to the subject to be able to focus.

The extension tubes don't report in the EXIF. I have them for both my EF and FD lens mounts, where I've been throwing 'extended' 420mm and 600mm effective focal lengths onto small subjects with the tubes letting me change how close I can get to the subject, rather than 15+ feet, getting say 6ish feet. The final three images in this recent post have an EF 25 tube behind the 300 + 2x config: https://www.uglyhedgehog.com/t-653918-1.html. The lenses and cameras are different across the various images, but the results are consistent between 85mm, 200mm macro, and the extended 600mm w/ the 25mm tube. When you're packing a compatible lens, the tubes give a macro option without packing the macro lens.

Architect1776 Loc: In my mind

Well put.

cbtsam Loc: Monkton, MD

Be very very careful using extension tubes!!! Macro Mania is a common psychiatric effect and, as far as I can tell, is absolutely incurable.

frankraney Loc: Clovis, Ca.

Yup, once you get the bug, it is uncurable!

Mark Sturtevant Loc: Grand Blanc, MI

As others have said, if they have electric contacts then you can communicate between the lens and the camera. The mainly useful thing there is for aperture control. You can try to use it to support automatic focus if you wish, but as many learn lenses can 'hunt' for focus in close up and macro work. So just switch to manual focus and focus mainly with the lens focus ring + rocking back and forth.
If they are without electrical contacts, then you will have to pre-set the aperture on the lens. f/11 is a good all around setting to start with, but you will want to experiment. You can find how to do that online. It's easy.

A tripod or monopod helps a lot. Not only to reduce camera shake, which seems considerable for this kind of work, but it is a significant energy saver for you. You will see.

User ID

Ooooooooooh .... PUN !!!!

Sarco

I am not sure what you mean by manual. If you mean that they are without electrical contacts then you really need a lens that adjusts the aperture on that lens, not via the camera. If those extension tubes have the contacts then all is well. Suggest that you set to manual focus.

Once you get "the bug" you need a tripod, and if you extend only two legs, placed square to the camera, this allows you to rock backwards and forwards to achieve focus. I also suggest that you photograph a ruler with each tube as this allows you to instantly grab the correct tube to "fill the frame", and capture that elusive bug.

Have fun, bug hunting is a great sport.

sscnxy

I love your beautiful images and aspire to catch the bug, too. I'm new to all this, so if you will bear with my question, please explain what you mean by 300 + 2x configuration, ie, what is the setup for that? Also please elaborate what "extended 420 and 600 mm effective focal length means, and what are the setups for those? Thanks much for helping me to understand macro better. Right now, I am using a Tokina 100 mm F2.8, but I can't get very sharp, highly magnified detail on my images, even after I carefully tuned the AF as well as I possibly could get it with my naked eyes and a good chart.

NMY

CHG_CANON Loc: the Windy City

A teleconverter (aka extender) is a different topic than an extension tube, the subject of this post. They can be used together. For some background details on extenders: https://digital-photography-school.com/the-pros-and-cons-of-using-tele-converters-extenders-on-your-dslr/

If you're not getting sharp images, consider these ideas: How to obtain sharp images in digital photography

Finally, you should consider creating a new post specific to your question(s) with one or a few example images stored as attachments. Then, we can discussion actionable feedback on your specific equipment, subjects and technique.

amfoto1 Loc: San Jose, Calif. USA

Please be more specific what you've got....

You call them "manual extension tubes", but that isn't a helpful description.

There are two major types of "macro extension tubes"....

1. Those with electronic connectivity to support modern lenses and cameras, such as the Canon EF and EOS.

2. And, those without any electronic connectivity.

Look inside either end of any the extension tubes. Do you see an arc of electrical contacts or not? This will look much like you see on the rear of your lens or the corresponding contacts just inside the bayonet mount of your camera.

If there are no contacts, they didn't cost much (probably less than $25, maybe less than $15 or even sometimes under $10!). Unfortunately, those would be pretty much worthless to you... unless you buy a vintage, manual focus, manual aperture lens and adapt it for use on the camera. Without any electronic contacts, you will have no autofocus... that's not too big a deal since macro is often shot using manual focus techniques anyway. The bigger problem with the tubes that don't provide electronic connectivity is that you will have no means of controlling your lens aperture... you will be unable to easily stop the lens down for more depth of field, which pretty much makes this type tube useless with modern electronically controlled lenses. But they can work fine with vintage lenses that have an aperture control ring right on the lens itself. (FYI there are many very good, vintage, manual focus/manual aperture lenses that can be bought used for bargain prices, if you wish to do so.)

The ones with electronic contacts tend to cost a bit more (roughly $50 to $150, depending upon brand and model). However, the ones with the electronic contacts will work with your camera and lens. With 50mm you would normally use shorter tubes... try a 12mm or a 20mm tube and see how much it increases magnification. Install it between lens and camera. This allows the lens to focus closer (though it will no longer be able to focus to infinity, while the extension is installed). The more extension you add, the closer you can focus and the higher the magnification that will be possible. You can combine the tubes to further increase extension and, along with it, the degree of magnification. Longer lens focal lengths need more extension to significantly change the lens' close focusing ability... while shorter focal lengths require less.

Of course, there will be a practical limit, where you simply get too close. It also becomes much harder to get a steady shot at higher magnifications.

I don't have the specs for the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 STM lens when used with extension tubes, but can tell you the previous model EF 50mm f/1.8 "II" by itself can only do about 0.15X magnification. That's not great and is roughly 1/6 "life size". With 12mm extension added it can do up to about 0.39X magnification, or better than 1/3 life size. Or, with 25mm of extension, it's able to do 0.68X, or a little over 2/3 life size (note: "life size" refers to your camera's image sensor, which is approx. 15mm x 23mm. Full 1.0X life size would be an image of an object that same size.... For example, a 10 cent U.S. dime coin is about 15mm in diameter, so would "fill your viewfinder" at full 1.0X.)

When you do close-ups, depth of field (DoF) becomes very shallow. You will often need to stop your lens down to increase DoF.

Higher magnification also makes it more difficult to get a steady shot, free of camera shake blur. Many macro shots are done with a tripod... or at least a monopod. If you plan to hand hold, bump up your shutter speed to help prevent shake blur in images. Since you're likely also stopping down your lens for more DoF, you will probably also have to increase your camera's ISO.

With extension on your lens, you are forcing it to focus closer than it was designed. There probably will be some uneven effect, where the center of the image is sharp, but the corners a bit soft. You also may see some vignetting, or darkening in the corners of images. Both these will be more noticeable with the lens "wide open" at f/1.8, and will likely be reduced if you stop the lens down to a middle (f/5.6) or small (f/11) aperture. Beware of too small aperture, though. f/16 and especially f/22 will cause an effect called "diffraction", which robs some fine detail from images.

The corner softness and vignetting I mention above aren't necessarily a bad thing. In fact, they can be "used" in images. For the image below I used my Canon 50mm lens (different from yours... mine is the f/1.4) with a relatively large aperture (f/2 if I recall correctly) and a 20 or 25mm extension tube, deliberately causing both those effects....



Hope this helps!

bleirer

A couple things I can add about extension tubes. The magnification you roughly get is the length of the tube divided by the focal length of the lens, plus add back in the native extension of the lens. So if your 50mm lens has .15 native magnification, using a 25mm extension tube gets you 25 divided by 50, so .50 magnification plus the native. 15, so .65 in all. If you use 50mm extension you'd get about 1.15 magnification.

Canon doesn't tell you in camera the actual aperture after extension, but Nikon does. Canon still meters the light accurately, it's just that it will display f8 but the real aperture will be smaller. So you start getting diffraction sooner than you might expect. .5 magnification will cost roughly a stop of aperture, 1.0 will cost about 2 stops.

Usually the lens manual spells out how extension tubes will react, find the manual on the Canon site.

Also you magnify camera shake along with the image, so it's better to use a tripod or a faster shutter speed, and it's better to focus stack a wider aperture rather than try to set the camera at f22 which in reality is much smaller than f22.

As a makeshift lightweight mahlstick or mini tripod I use 1 or 3 cut off lengths of dowels or driveway markers about 15 inches long, with rubber bands wrapped at the top to hold them together. Hold these in your left hand resting on the ground or nearby objects and rest the camera held in your right hand on top of your left hand to steady the shot.

sscnxy

Thanks much for the very informative forum topic link, which I'll study carefully.
I'll also try to do better navigating around UHH to ask my questions in the right section.

NMY