Playing with equipment

Some months ago I purchased a "macro/wide lens" from a seller on EBay. A true Macro lens costs hundreds of dollars but this combo set of lenses cost me a huge $45. I haven't used them much because I had a loan of a Canon D40 that was fitted with a true (expensive) macro lens. I have had to give that back to the owner so my cheapie set has been brought out of moth-balls!

This is what I am talking about. The macro/wide lens is in two parts and can be used together or individually. I used the wide lens last week on interior shots for a holiday resort. It did the trick! Of course there is a fair bit of lens correction to be done to remove the fish-eye effect of a wide angle lens. Today I was trying out the macro and I will show you later what I mean by "lens correction".
To begin with I tried the macro (the picture above left) on its own on text.

Then I removed it and moved the camera further away so that I could take the same text without the lens - I positioned the lens as close as I could focus, which was quite a long way further away from the page.

As you can see, I have indicated the coverage with the macro lens - and you can see from the two photos of the camera, the distances from the page. I used one of the children's rulers to show the relative distances.
From text I moved on to flowers. I selected some carnations out of the bunch.

On the left, no macro and as close as I could go to focus on the centre flower of the three. The picture on the right is with the macro and on wide angle - 17mm with the camera as close as I could focus. - very similar distances to those pictures of the text.
From that same distance I zoomed in to 55mm and here is the result.

Because aperture used has a huge effect on the depth of field I had selected f/14 and let the camera decide the Speed. for all the photographs Manual focus was used and the wireless remote was also used for every shot. I wanted to avoid any camera movement that may be cause by me pressing the button.
Then I put the "wide" part of the lens onto the macro lens and from a distance of35mm to the nearest flower, this is what I captured.

The picture on the left is as it was taken - the lens is so wide that the edges of the housing are included in the shot. In Photoshop Elements I used Lens Correction to remove the barrel distortion, then cropped the image which resulted in a very natural looking photograph of a bunch of carnations (actually they are "pinks" which is a cousin of the carnation!)
If you want to see the pictures larger, click on the first of the pictures and you will be able to view each of the pictures by either clicking on the pictures at the bottom of the screen or by using your arrow keys.
My goodness! I do ramble!
AJ