Panasonic FZ5 - Good for photomacrography?

A forum to ask questions, post setups, and generally discuss anything having to do with photomacrography and photomicroscopy.

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DantePT

Panasonic FZ5 - Good for photomacrography?

Post by DantePT »

Hi.
I'm planning to buy a panasonic fz5 sometime soon, and i would love to use it to take some macro pictures.

is it possible with this camera? and what adapters should i look for to this camera?
thanks!

_sergey_
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Joined: Fri Jan 28, 2005 3:34 pm
Location: Tver, Russia

Post by _sergey_ »

Panasonic FZ line can be used with great success for macro photography. You can see a lot of great photos by Danny (nzmacro) at this forum, taken with Panasonic and different additional lenses.

However, FZ5 has one really serious problem in this regard - it do not have manual focusing, which is very usefull for macro work. Btw, I suppose it is one of the main drawbacks of this camera comparing to FZ20 for example, and it allways stays unnoticeble when reading specs.

For the additional adapters... Diopter lenses are one of the common choices, and they are especially effective at long zoom. Cheap lenses produce poor results (expect chromatic oberrations and corner softness). Better results are achived with high quiality dual-element coated lenses like Canon and Nikon. Magnifying power of diopter lenses may be shown in Diopters (higher diopter - more magnification) or by focal length (lower focal length - more magnification), in fact D=1/L, where D is diopter power and L is a focal lenght in meters. To mount the lens you will probably need some sort of adapter for you camera designed to mount filters.

Another alternative may be using 35 mm camera lens in reversed position. If I remember correctly magnification increase is something like F1/F2 where F1 is a focal length of you camera lens and F2 is focal length of reversed lens. So great magnification can be achieved by mounting lens with short focal length in front of lens with long focal lenght. To do so you will need filter adapter and special reversing ring wich will connect filter threads on you camera and reversed lens. When working with reversed lenses expect really strong vignetteing (corner darkening) and other optical incompatibility problems.

WBR,
Sergey.

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nzmacro
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Post by nzmacro »

Howdy Dante. Sergey is correct. There would be no difference between shooting macro with the FZ5, FZ10 and the FZ20. I would suggest you get an adaptor hood to take a Nikon 6T to start with. Thats a great achromatic add on IMHO. You can always add another in the future for stacking them.

A great source for the FZ accessories and macro is

http://www.users.bigpond.com/vkelim/DMCFZ10/index.html


And the link for the hoods to take add ons

http://www.users.bigpond.com/vkelim/DMCFZ10/node98.html

Hes hunted out all sorts of info from different threads. David is also very nice guy.

All the best Dante and if you get stuck or we can help, just ask away :D

Danny.

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