The GetDPI Photography Forum

Great to see you here. Join our insightful photographic forum today and start tapping into a huge wealth of photographic knowledge. Completing our simple registration process will allow you to gain access to exclusive content, add your own topics and posts, share your work and connect with other members through your own private inbox! And don’t forget to say hi!

Bellows for G1/G2/GH1/GH2

S

sagarmatha

Guest
Can someone help me how to set up an equipment with adapter, bellows and lens?
Please state the name for each item so I can easily find them on google.
 

Michiel Schierbeek

Well-known member
There are many possibilitys. I have for example bellows from Novoflex with a noflexar lens on it in FD mount. I bought it on E-bay also because I have a lot of FD (macro) lenses. So I should search for bellows on which you can use lenses you already own.
Otherwise you can use any bellows ( Nikon, Contax/Yashica, Minolta MD etc) you can lay your hands on. As long it is in a mount wherefore a M4/3 adapter exists.

Good luck
 
S

sagarmatha

Guest
There are many possibilitys. I have for example bellows from Novoflex with a noflexar lens on it in FD mount. I bought it on E-bay also because I have a lot of FD (macro) lenses. So I should search for bellows on which you can use lenses you already own.
Otherwise you can use any bellows ( Nikon, Contax/Yashica, Minolta MD etc) you can lay your hands on. As long it is in a mount wherefore a M4/3 adapter exists.

Good luck
Thanks. Well I don't have any lenses at all. Read somewhere that for Nikon one has to buy a D lens. Can you name your equipment more precisely?
Will a flash like FL36 work normally with bellows, i.e does the TTL work ok?
 
V

Vivek

Guest
If you do not have any lenses at all, avoid Nikon.

There are other brands (M42, etc) that are cheaper and are as good or better than Nikon. The "D" lens is for Nikon cameras and have no use for on any other system.

As to the question of TTL metering, it appears that the G2 would do fine.

G1 with the last firmware update is OK but not great. No clues how the GH2 would behave.
 

photoSmart42

New member
At the risk of overwhelming you with information, I'll tell you my setup. Like others have written, there are MANY, MANY options you can go with because the format is so adaptable, so take my setup only as an example of what you could do.

1. For bellows, I use the Canon FL bellows in conjunction with my Canon FD/FL adapter. The FL mount is the older breech lock mount, which is shared by the early version of the FD mount before they went with the bayonet mount. The FD adapter should work seamlessly with either FL or FD lenses/accessories.

2. For lenses on the bellows I use a variety. I use the Canon FD 50/1.4 either normally mounted on the bellows, or reversed using the FD reversing adapter that comes with a 52mm thread. On occasion I also use my Panasonic 20/1.7 lens either reversed or normally fitted through a custom MFT-to-FD adapter. I also use my enlarging lenses (Fujinon-EP 50 or EL-Nikkor 40) with an M42-to-FD adapter, then an M39-to-M42 adapter ring to fit the lenses themselves to the adapter. I also use microscope lenses through an RMS-to-M42 adapter that I then fit to the aforementioned M42-to-FD adapter on the bellows.

3. For lighting I use a variety of sources depending on the magnification I'm working with. I don't have a TTL flash, so I use an off-camera Vivitar 285 flash unit with either an optical slave triggered from my camera flash, an RF slave triggered by a remote flash trigger on my camera hot shoe, or through a TTL cord. For high magnification work I use a Dolan-Jenner Fiber-Lite with light guides.

4. Supposedly the TTL function doesn't work very well with adapted lenses in manual mode because the camera doesn't know what aperture setting you're using, so you're forces into using manual flash anyway. I can't verify that, but others like Godfrey, Vivek and others have quite a bit of experience in this so they can chime in. I think they may have fixed that in the later releases of the firmware, but I simply don't know to what extent.

Hope this helps.
 

Godfrey

Well-known member
Can someone help me how to set up an equipment with adapter, bellows and lens? ...
A cheap solution for flat-field, high magnification work:

- Adapt a bellows from any mount you find that's cheap.
- Find an enlarging lens in the focal length you want.
- Adapt that to the bellows.

Bellows units for Pentax, Konica, Canon FD, etc can be found for $50 or less if you look hard enough. Adapters from $12. Enlarging lenses can often be found for virtually nothing, but good ones like Rodenstock, Nikkor-EL, Schneider, etc can be had for $50-200. Most enlarging lenses are Leica threaded mount, IIRC, and you can find an adapter for that to most other mounts pretty easily, or make one yourself.
 
Top