I’ve been interested to see how this lens compares to the 100mm L macro that I have for quite a while, so I decided to rent it this weekend. I’m not going to do a side by side with the two, as the answer is obvious in terms of magnification. What I was more interested in was the usability comparison.

It’s obviously a pretty specialised piece of kit, having no auto-focus and image stabilisation. I’ve recently been experimenting with photo stacking, using the cheap focus rail that I picked up from eBay a while back. I’d go as far as saying that, while not essential for using this lens, it’s getting pretty close to it. Having a decent tripod certainly is.

I might as well get this dirty little secret out there: you can be pretty sure that in any picture of a bug that has decent depth of field that you have encountered, the subject is dead. There is no other way of doing the focus stacking. I don’t like doing this, so the only consideration is to try to dispatch the creature in as painless a way as possible. The solution that I’ve come up with is to pop it into a freezer. [No such consideration should be given to wasps which are airborne evil incarnate.]

Even with the focus rail, the MP-E 65 is still a bit of a dog to use. The front element is about a centimetre and a half in diameter which [stating the obvious here] means you are not getting a lot of light in. Live View is still possible by flicking between whatever the flash settings are in Manual mode to F2.8 in AV. However, the it’s still a little bit tricky to get the subject in focus.

In terms of handling, it’s a pretty serious piece of kit: very solid and heavy, with a smooth extension mechanism.

One other point to make is that if you close the lens down from maximum magnification, you can actually feel the air being pumped out of the housing. It’s going to attract a fair amount of dust over the course of a life in service.

I’ve probably not timed this particularly well in terms of subject matter – a cold spring day in England hasn’t got a lot of creepy-crawlies going on. Appended is an early result, which is comprised of a stack of 9 shots. I’ve downloaded the trial of CS5 to do the processing.