I’ve been hammering this lens all weekend to get as much value out of the hire period as I can, and it’s a pretty enjoyable piece of kit.

I’ve taken about 400 pictures with it, and I’ve turned process into a mini production line: connecting the camera via USB from where it’s set up, importing the shots, exporting to the file system from Aperture, picking the pictures up in CS5 to start the automerge and autoblend off, and then setting up the next shot while that is churning. The Photoshop piece takes a fair amount of processing: I have a pretty powerful machine [a six core Mac Pro] and it takes about 5 minutes or so to run both steps.

All of the kit is running fine, including the focus rail, which I was most concerned about going into this. I’ve found it’s better to simply keep one hand on the adjustment dial all the time and snap the shots, rather than going into and out of Live View mode [including the switch from Manual to AV] to tweak the focus. There is a bit of bounce with the rail and the tripod head so by the time the vibration has settled down you will have lost the reference of what you are focusing away from.

I’ve been generally taking a stack of around 20 shots, and here we get on to the weak link in the chain: the processing of the stack itself. I’ve had some quite mixed results. The conclusion that I’ve come to is that the subject needs to be quite uniform, with little depth in and of itself. So it’s fine, say, to focus through the curve of the insect’s head. However, if you have a leg or antenna in the foreground, as you focus through that, you get a residual halo in the final image, surrounding the in-focus object. This is formed by the blurring of the object when you are focusing behind it for the slices of the stack further back. [The same would be true if you are focusing in front of the object]. Even the furry filaments on the body of a bee were causing problems. The end results is that I’ve been left with some odd artefacts in the final images. I’ll have to do some more research on the processing side.

So: conclusions: would I buy one of these lenses? I don’t think so, I’ve got all of the lenses that I need. Anything from here on in is going to be fairly specialised in nature, and this beast is the perfect candidate for hiring. I could see myself taking the hire option up again. And my final thought: woodlice are grim little critters up close.

Here is a selection of shots.