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Description
For those of you who don't know much about photography, you may not understand most of what I'm about to say! Sorry about that. <3

Last weekend my 3 reverse rings came in the mail, I ordered them off ebay (courtesy of my uncles paypal account, I just refunded him). A single 52mm reverse ring from Nikon (the Nikon BR-2A) will cost you over $30 ($39.99 on Amazon.com), I got all three off ebay for less. I ordered a 52mm , 67mm , and a 52mm-67mm male-to-male reversing ring. They came from Hong Kong, China and Japan I think. They are not brand reverse rings, so I was a little worried that the quality wouldn't be so great. However I was proved wrong when I tried them out, they were perfect!

This deviation is showing the power of my 52mm reverse ring attached to my Nikkor 50mm 1.4 lens , reverse mounted on my Nikon D90. Top left you can see the lens performing at it's closest focusing distance, 0.45m/1.5 feet! Useless for closeup work. However, screwing the reverse ring onto the front lens thread and mounting the lens on the camera backwards let's the lens focus to a distance of about 4cm . Neither of the top photos were cropped.

When mounting in reverse the main challenges are light and DOF. In order to have enough light in the photo, you either have to sacrifice with a thin DOF or stop the camera down more then you would if the lens was mounted the right way around. This is no big deal if you can handhold well or have a tripod, or if you have external lighting. The depth of field in a reversed lens is incredibly small, which means most of the time you will have to have the aperture open to f/16 or f/22 (examples: for insects where you want lots of detail), and you will need lots of light.

However, even at the largest aperture (f/1.4) I was able to achieve a good amount of DOF on the top right image as the ring was relatively flat.. There was plenty of light coming from the left hand side by a window. One of the reasons that persuaded me towards my 50mm lens was the fact it has an aperture ring on the lens itself, making it so much easier to change apertures when reverse mounted. In my opinion it is a great alternative to buying a $600+ Nikkor macro lens. Of course it's not going to replace a macro lens by any means, but this is the 'cheap man's macro' and does a damn good job at it.

Description
For those of you who don't know much about photography, you may not understand most of what I'm about to say! Sorry about that. <3

Last weekend my 3 reverse rings came in the mail, I ordered them off ebay (courtesy of my uncles paypal account, I just refunded him). A single 52mm reverse ring from Nikon (the Nikon BR-2A) will cost you over $30 ($39.99 on Amazon.com), I got all three off ebay for less. I ordered a 52mm , 67mm , and a 52mm-67mm male-to-male reversing ring. They came from Hong Kong, China and Japan I think. They are not brand reverse rings, so I was a little worried that the quality wouldn't be so great. However I was proved wrong when I tried them out, they were perfect!

This deviation is showing the power of my 52mm reverse ring attached to my Nikkor 50mm 1.4 lens , reverse mounted on my Nikon D90. Top left you can see the lens performing at it's closest focusing distance, 0.45m/1.5 feet! Useless for closeup work. However, screwing the reverse ring onto the front lens thread and mounting the lens on the camera backwards let's the lens focus to a distance of about 4cm . Neither of the top photos were cropped.

When mounting in reverse the main challenges are light and DOF. In order to have enough light in the photo, you either have to sacrifice with a thin DOF or stop the camera down more then you would if the lens was mounted the right way around. This is no big deal if you can handhold well or have a tripod, or if you have external lighting. The depth of field in a reversed lens is incredibly small, which means most of the time you will have to have the aperture open to f/16 or f/22 (examples: for insects where you want lots of detail), and you will need lots of light.

However, even at the largest aperture (f/1.4) I was able to achieve a good amount of DOF on the top right image as the ring was relatively flat.. There was plenty of light coming from the left hand side by a window. One of the reasons that persuaded me towards my 50mm lens was the fact it has an aperture ring on the lens itself, making it so much easier to change apertures when reverse mounted. In my opinion it is a great alternative to buying a $600+ Nikkor macro lens. Of course it's not going to replace a macro lens by any means, but this is the 'cheap man's macro' and does a damn good job at it.