As much as I'd love to buy a 90 or 105 macro lens, I just can't afford it and won't be able to for some time. I'm planning on getting a set of close up lenses in the interim. A 1,2 and 4X to be specific. (tiffen) I have no experience with them and don't know much but wanted to know your opinions. I'm not a professional but I want to be able to do some pseudo-macro shots and it seems like these will do that and keep me from putting another 3 or 400 bucks on my credit card. Your opinions, please.
You might want to try out the Kenko extension tube set instead. They work very well and only cost around $125 or so. Depending on which lens you are using you can get some very close ups using extension tubes and lenses that you already own.
It's worth spending a bit of time looking into the whole range of options before you start spending cash.
John Shaw's Closeups in Nature is a good book on this topic and what equipment you can use, other than macro lenses ( a lot of stuff about using wide angle, normal and telephoto non-macro lenses for close up work for example)
Might be worth a flick through or borrowing from a library before spending more money than you might need to spend.
As much as I'd love to buy a 90 or 105 macro lens, I just can't afford it and won't be able to for some time. I'm planning on getting a set of close up lenses in the interim.
Close up lenses are like filters that screw onto the front of a lens. A macro lens is an interchangeable lens that is optimized to focus at or near 1:1 magnification.
close-up lenses are like a pair of reading glasses for your camera.
a macro lens is one that is designed from the start to focus closely and typically give much better performance than close-up lenses, just because they are designed for that purpose in the first place, rather than trying to adapt a normal lens to the job.
However, that comes with a significant extra price and you can get perfectly acceptable results with non-macro lenses and the appropriate convertors/ extension tubes/ close-up lenses/ bellows etc
I have used close-up lenses for all my macro shots. They've worked fine for me. I believe I even have the Tiffen set that you are talking about (I'm no good with brand names, I need to go home to confirm that ;).
