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.

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.