Macro Lens from a Pringles Can

isharq writes "In a cool little feat of extremely low-tech hardware hacking, Photocritic has created a macro lens out of a Pringles can. According to the article: "with less than £1 worth of equipment, a little bit of sweat and tears, you can build yourself a surprisingly good macro lens". The results are astonishing."

Macro lens?

[Hatta]

And what is a "macro lens"? How does it differ from a normal lens?

Macro is where digital can shine

[mrm677]

The primary difficulty in macro photography is getting enough depth-of-field (DOF), which is totally dependent on the film area size. Although this is a gross simplification, in general, the smaller the film area the more DOF you get. This is where tiny digital sensors shine. If you are serious about Macro, forget about 35mm or larger film formats. And I might even forget about full-frame dSLRs too and instead choose the APS-sized sensor.

And this is coming from someone who shoots 4x5 large-format for most of my photography. Combine a 4x5" negative scanned at a modest 2400dpi gets you over 100 megapixels. However any large-format shooter knows that controlling DOF is much more difficult because of the large film area. In fact this is why our cameras have movements. Instead of fixing the lens completing parallel with the film, we can move it around in order to change the plane of focus. For a nice example, check out this image in which the plane of focus extends from the guys knuckle to his eyes:

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/multimedia/photo_ gallery/2005/11/29/gallery.boxiing/content.11.html [cnn.com]

Of course you can mimic the effect in Photoshop, but this requires everything to be sharp to start with and sometimes this just isn't possible for the given subject distance and film area size.

Even easier

[pqdave]

I use velcro to temporarily attach a $1.99 jeweler's loupe to the front of my point and shoot digicamera. Cost is similar to a box of Pringles, image quality is fine for web pics. By buying the $3.99 set of 5 loupes, I get a variety of magnification levels, down to a 2mm object taking up the full frame.