my bad photography

I just saw this video recommended to me.

This has so many views and it is so bad.

This is not how macro extension tubes work.

At all.

You can't just keep adding more of them to get more macro. All you are doing is reducing the amount of light reaching the sensor and making it harder to take your photo.

All lenses have a minimum focusing distance (A) and a minimum working distance (B).

The minimum focus distance is measured from the sensor. This is the absolute closest distance where you can attain sharp focus on a subject. This is usually the spec the camera manufacturer gives you, but it isn't very useful because it doesn't take the length of the lens into consideration.

Minimum working distance is how close the end of your lens is to your subject. You figure this out by adding the flange distance (google it for your camera), and then add the length of your lens, and then subtract that from the minimum focus distance.

Whatever is leftover is how close you can get to stuff.

In this example, this is as close as the lens can get to the flower before it can no longer achieve sharp focus. If you get any closer, it will be blurry.

If you have a short working distance, this can be problematic for macro work. Your lens could create a shadow on your subject. You might be so close that you disturb the insects you are trying to shoot. You risk scratching your lens if you are shooting near rocks or other scratchy objects. So finding a macro lens with a decent working distance is always optimal. You can back off from your subject and get a lot of light in there and not have to worry so much about disturbing critters.

But if you don't have a macro lens, you can increase the magnification of any lens by adding extension tubes. It is a low cost way to get into macro photography, but it isn't a perfect solution.

Macro Lens

The easiest and highest quality way is to just buy a macro lens that does the level of magnification you desire. 1x is usually plenty for most people and is easy to work with. A macro lens will give you the sharpest results with little distortion and you don't take as big of a sacrifice on the amount of light you can capture.

Macro Extension Tubes

Next easiest is extension tubes. I like these because they don't change the quality of the lens. They are just hollow tubes. So if you have a really nice lens, tubes will not hinder its optical quality. But operating with a small working distance can be a huge pain. Also, make sure you get extension tubes with the electronic contacts. They allow your lens to still communicate with your camera so you can use autofocus and set the aperture. The ones you want will probably mention "autofocus" in their product description.

Reverse Lens Mount

These kinda suck. They flip your lens backwards so it magnifies the image. If you have ever looked through binoculars backward, they make everything look tiny and far away. Same concept.

Unfortunately there is no communication with your camera. So you have do manual focus and you have to "trick" your aperture into closing to the desired f-stop or use a lens with an aperture ring. If you don't mind the lens being wide open, these are okay, but your depth of field is going to get razor thin.

Bellows

A less talked about option is macro bellows. You may have seen some old timey cameras with bellows.

Same thing. These work exactly like extension tubes but with much greater precision. You can dial in your working distance to the exact amount you need and you don't have to take tubes on and off to do it. These can get pretty spendy, especially if you don't want to lose communication with your camera body.

Technical Cameras

These are basically advanced bellows systems with tilt and shift mechanisms built in. The technical camera goes between your lens and your camera body. Since macro work has a shallow depth of field, the tilt and shift feature allows you to change the angle of the depth of field to be more advantageous. Especially if you are photographing flat subjects from an angled point of view. In some cases you can avoid focus stacking when greater depth of field is needed.

Close-up Lens

Another lower cost solution is close-up lenses (diopters). These are just magnifying lenses that screw onto the end of your normal lens. I personally don't care for this option because these lenses are never going to have the optical quality of your actual lens. So they could greatly soften your results if they aren't made well. You might get similar results just cropping your image and using an upscaler. It just depends on the magnification level and the quality of the glass they use.

If you don't need professional quality, this is a very convenient, non-pain-in-the-ass way to get macro magnification. You can easily take them on and off and they can fit in your pocket. As a fun bonus, you can manually hold them in front of your smartphone if you want.

Microscope Objectives

These are microscope systems that are adapted to fit onto a regular camera body. A company called Laowa just released their Aurogon objectives which give you 10x, 20x, 35x, and 50x magnification.

These are for extremely advanced users. When you get beyond 2x, taking sharp, high quality photos becomes very difficult. You need special equipment and sliders and stabilization and your floors usually need to be concrete. Or you need some kind of super heavy table to place your subject on. I have seen one person set a block of marble on a table to keep things stable.

Some very good macro artists were able to take the 10x objective out into the woods on big, heavy tripods and get decent results, but they had years of experience to help them. For most, it really is best to work in a studio. These objectives need very long exposures or a ton of light to work well.

While these are difficult to work with, in the right hands, you can do some cool microscopy.

For a novice, I would say staying in the realm of 1-2x is probably best.

You can get a 2x macro lens for under $500 if don't need autofocus.

Also, you can combine a few of the methods above. You can reverse a lens and attach it to another lens. You can use extension tubes with a reversed lens. Or a close-up lens with extension tubes. Lots of ways to experiment. Just remember the more complicated you make it, the harder it will be to get good results.

And if you are really serious about macro, I highly suggest investing in a focusing rail. This will allow you to do focus stacking to avoid the super shallow depth of field, but also make manual focusing much easier. (which is usually best for super close up stuff)