Close Upset Adapters

[David]

So I got this box of like 60 filters a month or so ago, all of them old and glass and in pretty good shape. There were some oddities, but none I loved as much as these:







It's hard to see, but it says " Close-Upset". I don't love them for their usefulness -- the only useful filters were the ND and polarizing rings. I love them for their typo.

So I decided I should give these shot, knowing the results would not be great. For fun, I put them on a Vivitar 135mm f2.8 TX mount lens. It's a nifty little lens, but with a macro adapter it makes odd results. Notably, the addition of lenses gives this lens one focal distance: closest setting and a very narrow focal range of about three feet in front of the lens. Here are some results:


Firstly, here is the pinecone I took the macros of. This is a bit bigger than an American football. Here's one with my cell phone for a size comparison:



This is taken with the +2, and me holding the branch in the wind, as I had to do for all of these, so they're even blurrier than normal.


The bokeh on this lens is normally no hollow, indicating that the macro lens has affected that aspect of lens performance. It's worth noting that the macro lens has affected many more aspects of this lens' performance, as the images pretty clearly show.


And this is as in-focus as I could get the lens with both the +2 and +3 filters.

In a nutshell, just because the filter CAN fit on the end of the lens doesn't mean it SHOULD fit on the end of the lens. These do have an artsy effect, and would be great for obtaining soft-focus portraits of my nephew's G.I. Joe figures.