Back in the 1980’s I had an extensive collection of Olympus camera equipment, including an OM2 and an OM2N. Better yet, I had a bellows attachment. Well, actually, I still do. I have this hoarding affliction, especially when it comes to beautifully machined equipment.
Fast forward to 2020 and I treated myself to a Nikon Z50 which is a mirrorless camera. I wanted a lighter camera which I would be more likely to pick up on my way out for a dog walk, and it’s been great for that. But that isn’t what this post is about.
Lens adapters
Mirrorless cameras have the sensor mounted close to the front of the camera, so it’s easy to accommodate lenses which were designed to focus some distance behind the lens mount by building out. Third-party manufacturers only have to create a sturdy tube which attaches to the camera lens plate at one end and the lens plate at the other and make the distance between them such that the lens will focus on the sensor.
In other words, the lenses that fit my OM2 can now attach to my Z50 via a fairly inexpensive adapter. I got a NEWYI, and I’ve included a couple of pictures taken with my 1981 f2.8 35-80mm Tamron just for interest. Getting back to the point of this post, I can now put an Olympus lens on the front of my bellows (which has an Olympus adapter at each end), then the NEWYI Olympus to Z-mount adapter at the back of the bellows and finally the Z50 to the back of the adapter.
Bellows issues
In case you’ve never heard of a bellows, it’s like an extension tube which can change the distance between lens and camera by extending or contracting the bellows. Back in the day, using this contraption was a bit of an adventure. For a start, all we had was film, so the results took a week or so to come back. Then, there was the difficulty of seeing what it was you were taking a picture of. To get any kind of depth of focus, one had to use a tiny aperture. To see anything, you needed a large aperture.
The linkage that instantaneously stops down when the shutter is tripped doesn’t pass through a bellows, so you had to remember to manually stop down for each exposure. You might find some device to externally stop down the lens when the shutter is released (usually proprietary) but otherwise you needed a lens which has an aperture ring, and open and close it as needed.
If the subject was at ground level, you were too, because you had to look through the eyepiece. Some system cameras had right-angle adapters, or something that replaced the pentaprism, but that was pretty rare. I remember one session laying on my stomach peering at a preying mantis on my back lawn through this set-up and taking a 24-shot roll over the course of an hour, and then, when I went to rewind the film (remember doing that?) I found that I had not attached it properly, so all 24 shots had been exposed on the same frame. No, I didn’t go back and re-take the series.
Much easier using a digital Z50
With a mirrorless camera, the viewfinder can show how the final image will be rendered, so even with f16, you can see what you’re doing, because the digital preview will be automatically brightened. Even better, the rear screen tilts, so you don’t need to get down and dirty. And of course, with digital, one has instant review of the actual image you just took. Come to think of it, if I came across another preying mantis willing to pose, I would be taking video through the bellows – never mind 24 still shots!
Challenges with super macro
With bellows, there are two adjustments: to change the magnification you move the lens end of the bellows and/or the camera end and thus the distance between lens and sensor. This will also change the focus. To focus, you move the entire rig (camera, bellows and lens) to change the distance from lens to the subject. Tiny changes make a big difference. If you are taking a picture of a flower, the slightest breeze moves the flower in and out of focus. My bellows was purchased with a focussing track, which allows everything to be mounted on a tripod, and turning a focussing knob moves the entire frame back and forth. But it doesn’t stop the wind.
Then there are the problems with depth of field, which are no different from the ones go get with a dedicated macro lens. You have a tiny portion of the image in focus, and the trick is to put that where it will do most good! One advantage you have with a focussing track is the possibility of focus stacking. I haven’t ever tried this technique, but it seems to me that if the subject is static, turning a knob a quarter turn and taking a picture would be simpler than twisting a focussing ring – but all of this is conjecture.
My limited experience with the bellows so far suggests that a good macro lens is probably a lot less fussy, but there may still be situations where a bellows makes sense. However, photography isn’t always about practicality; sometimes you keep equipment around just because it looks and feels great!
Slide duplication
But wait, when I got the bellows I included an attachment which holds either a colour slide or a 35mm negative. A dedicated slide duplicator, which, attached to a Z50 produces 5568×3712 images. From my quick experiment, it looks like once the distances are dialed in and locked down, so that the entire slide area is captured and in focus, getting good quality slide or negative copies is probably just a matter of making sure the original is clean and dust free.
The two samples I tried were taken using default automatic exposure, no special lighting and manual focussing. I’m sure that using a flash on an extension cord or LED lighting would be an improvement in colour correctness. Focussing on a throwaway slide with a scratch on the emulsion would be better than doing it by eye, even with magnifying the viewing screen. Back in the 80’s I don’t think I could have imagined composing and focussing on a high resolution viewing screen which could show a magnified image!
I have a post about my solution for cataloguing and copying colour slides .
Old slides weren’t perfect
One warning about bringing analogue photos to new life – I’m coming to realize that focussing standards back then weren’t as rigorous as they are today. All focussing was manual; you focussed by twisting the lens barrel at the same time you were twisting a different bit to zoom in or out. Or maybe I was just a lousy photographer. But if you think about it, the average negative was magnified only four times and printed on matte 4×6 paper, or possibly projected on an old bed sheet. Today I inspect my photographs at the pixel level on a 24″ screen. Anyway, I’ve yet to be impressed by any of my ancient photographs. It might be just as well to leave them as perfect memories rather than imperfect copies!
There are a couple of examples of two slides I dug out of storage and copied shown below: the koala and the polar bear. Incidentally, I took the koala’s photo by climbing the tree it was in. The polar bear, I took from behind the crowd barrier at Toronto Zoo!
Bellows and sensor dust
New technology has its problems too. When I was editing the photos I had taken with the bellows, I found some black marks on the light parts of the day lily. Then I found the exact same marks on another image. In almost twenty years of digital photography, I’ve never seen sensor dust before, but once you see it, you know it’s there. If you think about it, it makes sense – there is this box with multiple nooks and crannies which has been stored in a cardboard box for 30-some years, and then you open and close it when it’s attached to a camera. It’s called a bellows for heaven’s sake, wouldn’t you expect it to blow any dust around?
So I’m going to blow out the bellows cavity before its next use, and invest in some sensor cleaners. Meanwhile, it looks like I was able to remove the dust from the Z50 with a simple blower-brush, and from the images with a simple cloning tool. Lesson learned.
Sample photos
Here are some of the results of my first and only bellows session, the set-up I used and a couple of samples each of slide duplication and non-bellows images using old manual-focus lenses. So far, my conclusion is that although it’s been fun bringing old equipment back to life, so far either it or my technique isn’t yet ready for prime time!
