No photographer worth a grain of sodium sulfite doesn’t have a box of long forgotten photo trinkets tucked away in an unvisited corner of the basement. You know the stuff: assorted lens caps, a filter that promised to make your photo twinkle with star-like effects, or the mystery cable that attached something to your camera… but what? And now, ever changing technology has made that box bulge a little further with out dated gizmos.
I was digging around in my box a few days ago and happened upon the Izumanon close-up zoom attachment lens. How it got in the box- when I bought it- if I bought it- will remain an resolved mystery. I Googled it and found it all over the place on 
e-bay for around $5.00. With my dreams of some fast cash dissolved, I decided to see if it would work with any of my lenses. Amazingly enough, it fit perfectly on the barrel of my ancient 55 macro lens. The combination of the two made possible wonderful extreme close-ups the lens alone could not produce.
Luckily, for the last few weeks the Mountain Laurel bush in the front of my house has put on an amazing display of softball sized clusters of tiny white flowers, with each flower measuring around an inch. When they started to fall they looked like hundreds of shrunken sombreros scattered along the sidewalk. They are all turning brown now,but even in their decay there is a beauty, and they made perfect specimens for my newly found equipment.
Its funny in this age of high-priced and complicated do-dads that there are cheap and simple alternatives. Maybe you should go box- diving in your basement. You never know what you might find.
Here are a few of the images made with the attachment, along with a photo of the set-up.
All the images were backlit using a light box. As a general rule of thumb for macro photography, it’s best to use the smallest aperture possible for sharpness and detail. Doing so will require a longer shutter. If the shutter goes below 1/60 of a second it’s best to use a tripod. But I wanted a more ethereal effect so I shot it at f/3.5, the largest aperture on my macro, which provided almost no depth of field. I’m not sure what effect the lens attachment has on the lens concerning reductions in aperture. In the old days, with film, this was critical information. But now I use the digital display to view the image. When it looks right I go with it. The final settings for this images is F/3.5 at 1 second.
I pulled off one flower and found a wonderful star shaped pattern left from the stem. This shot was made by over exposing about 2 stops at f/22 at ½ second.
I made several shots of fresh flowers but found this photograph of a withering flower more poignant. The setting was f/22 at 1.5 seconds.
Finally, the lens attachment pulled into detail the tiny stamens of this flower. Each stamen was less that 1/8 inch with an exposure of f/22 at 2 sec. A tripod and camera release cable was crucial in making this image.
