New year, brings new directions.  At least I can hope since a little Fuji addition which was supposed to be a Christmas present arrived well into the new year.  The Fuji 16mm extension tube.  It’s a little piece of hardware that moves your lens away from the camera.  The nice thing is that it has all the electronic contacts, so auto focus works as normal, and the camera knows which lens is attached.  It allows for the lens to focus closer to the subject, which makes practically any lens a macro lens.  The one caveat of the extension tube is that the lens looses focus at about 1 meter.  Then again I was expecting to shoot with this tube normally anyway.  Most of the images were taken with the Fuji 56mm f1.2 and it worked very well as a macro lens.  I also tried my old Pentax 100mm f4 Macro lens.  It worked very well. 

I wanted to compare the results with a Canon 100mm f2.8 Macro, which is considered a true macro lens as the level of magnification is 1:1.  Both Fuji 60mm Macro and the old Pentax 100mm Macro are only 1:2 which is half the magnification of the Canon lens. 

My wife went first with the Canon 40D and 100mm Macro.  I literally followed her footsteps around our house.  It was a pretty chilly morning, with a fresh light snow, perfect for this type of photography.  Here are the results.  The images in this gallery will alternate, starting with Fuji, then Canon, Fuji, Canon, etc.  Personally, I think for a $100, the Fuji 16mm Extension Tube is well worth it, and it’s an easy, cheap way of expanding your photography.