Venus Optical Macro Lens

[rpcrowe]

Venus Optical of China produced this 60mm f/2.8 Macro Lens and marketed it under several names, including Laowa. This specific copy has no brand identification but, it does indicate that the ratio can be as great as 2:1. It is a well built item of all metal construction that results in a heavy lens with a Sony E-Mount.

It was marketed as an APSC format lens but, doesn't vignette on a full frame camera when shot in close-up / macro distances.

It is totally manual; both for focus and exposure and,of course, doesn't provide EXIF information.



The front element of this lens retracts back into the barrel when shooting at less than closeup distances resulting in the barrel becoming a deep lens hood...



The front element extends the distance of the lens when shooting in the 2:1 ratio...



I have not used this lens because my Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8 lens has such good close focusing capabilities. However, the Venus lens does a very good job in close up/macro work...







Working manually with a Sony mirrorless camera is relatively easy because of focus peaking. However, the DOF at a 2:1 ratio is so razor thin, that it is difficult to use. I would expect that focus stacking might help in this situation.



I don't remember how much I paid for the lens but seem to remember that it was around $100 USD...

[rpcrowe]

The problem with this background material is that the texture shows up as a dotted pattern. The dots are less discernible when the subject is further from the BG and the texture is less in focus.

I have ordered a batch of various colored craft paper to use as backgrounds from Amazon.com to get plain backgrounds and to have a larger choice of colors.
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/...0?ie=UTF8&th=1

OFF TOPIC: When ordering from Amazon (or any online merchant) you really need to pay attention to orders... When I first looked at this craft paper, Ithought "I really don't need 60 sheets - after all, I can use each sheet many times!" Then I realized that a 20 sheet order is charged a shipping fee and a 60 sheet order includes free shipping. The 20 sheet order costs $10.61 (USD) while 60 sheets costs $10.98 (USD). It's a no brainer to order 60 sheets...

The order will arrive tomorrow and I will experiment using the different colored papers...