I am an avid photography fan and a gadget geek too. I am the camera company’s target market all on my own!
I own two cameras, the Nikon D300 and the Nikon FM3a – watch out for reviews coming soon.
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Hi John. I read a lot on your site and I would love to ask you one question. I like your article about scanning films using dlsr and planning to buy a macro lens for this purpose. And I simply don’t know what focal lenght and minimal focus lenght I have to choose ti fill whole finder of my DLSR with 35 mm film frame to have bigger res. possible. Is this part so tricky?
Best regards, M.
Hi Martin,
Thanks for getting in touch!
I use a Nikkor 105mm Micro lens. I find that my D300 will focus quite a bit closer than is required to fill the frame. By definition a macro lens should focus to at least 1:1 scale – that’s what macro means – and given that the 35mm slide/negative is bigger than most amateur DSLR’s cropped sensors that should mean that on a DSLR’s cropped sensor any macro lens will fill the DSLR’s viewfinder with a 35mm slide, in focus.
The other point you may want to think about is how far from the slide/negative you want the camera to be. My investigations on the internet suggested that 105mm is a more useful focal length for a macro than 60mm when performing traditional macro photography because the 60mm lens demands that the object is so close to the camera that it is difficult to get the light on the subject. This isn’t a concern for our backlit negative/slide scanning – however you may want to use the macro lens for other things….
You can work the correct focal length/focal distance for your camera mathematically (google search) but that’s too clever for me! I’d suggest going to a camera shop that has a good stock of lenses and trying out the lenses which you are considering buying in person. Better off safe than sorry (and worse off).
Thanks a lot for your reply!
I think you’re right. I should try it in shop and look for myself. Problem is that I’m looking for macro lens only for scanning so I would love to find the cheapest way possible as even cheaper lenses should draw well when F is about 11, I hope.
Well, nice lens, Nikkor micro. Cost a lot here. Wondering why the lenses that are not 1:1 are labeled as “macro” also.
For example: Tamron AF 70-300 mm F/4-5,6 Di LD Macro. Minimal focusing lenght is 0,95 m. Well. I think it would not fill the frame completely anyway. I just feel confused about it.
Hi Martin,
Yeah, it’s confusing. The 1:2 means that you will only get 50% of a 35mm frame filled with a 35mm film. However if you have an amateur DSLR as I do, then you gain roughly 50% extra zoom due to the smaller APS-C sensor size, so you should achieve 75% of the frame filled – which on a 10Mp camera should leave you with plenty of pixels to play with.
Best to try an equivalent lens first though, rather than rely on my musings!