The (Other) End of the Internet

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I recalled reading something not terribly long ago which suggested that if you could take a telephoto lens and attach it to the camera backwards it would make a great Macro lens - good for close-up shots. Today I tried it.

I have a 3X teleconverter lens that fits onto my Canon Powershot G2. It’s not the right lens for that camera because the opening in the end of the lens that attaches to the camera is less than half the diameter of the camera lens, but I can usually use the camera’s optical zoom and some creative image cropping to work around that problem. This morning I held the teleconverter against the camera’s lens backwards. I had to hold it there manually because there are no industrial clamps designed to mate these two lenses in this fashon.

Once I had it held steady enough for a quick test, I put the camera in Macro mode and took this shot of my computer screen. Normally, even in macro mode, my camera won’t focus on anything closer than about 7 inches away. I can relate to that. When I’m wearing my single-vision glasses, my eyes won’t focus on anything less than about 9 inches away. When I took this picture, the end of the lens was actually touching the screen. You really can’t get much closer than that!

If you click on the thumbnail and look at the full-sized picture, you can tell quite easily that I have an LCD monitor because you can actually see the individual pixels in the Start Button.

I’m going to remember this trick for a few weeks from now when the insect population starts making itself known again.

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