Sony A6 series and 30mm Macro

Hi,

I was wondering if anyone had any experience shooting with a Sony A6 series  (e.g., A6000) with a Sony 30mm macro lens underwater. I’m thinking about buying the 30mm lens to use in a seafrogs housing for close up/macro photography. Can’t justify the 90mm macro at the moment and would rather use a more versatile lens that I could shoot a bit wider with. Have you been happy with this setup and the shots you’re getting? How easy or hard is it to use?

Thanks,

Atom65

I have one. Tried it a couple times, wasn't happy with the results - you need to get far too close to the subject to get decent magnification. My most-used macro lens these days is actually a Canon 60mm EF-S on a Metabones IV adapter - it's not as tight as the Sony 90mm, and focuses much faster, although in poor light it tends to hunt indefinitely, but a focus light mostly solves that. I mount the 90mm when I expect to find really tiny critters that will give me supermacro opportunities.

Edit: Note, however, that your experience with adapter lenses may vary from mine - I recall reading that A6300 works much better with adapted lenses than earlier cameras.

1 hour ago, ATOM65 said:

Hi,

I was wondering if anyone had any experience shooting with a Sony A6 series  (e.g., A6000) with a Sony 30mm macro lens underwater. I’m thinking about buying the 30mm lens to use in a seafrogs housing for close up/macro photography. Can’t justify the 90mm macro at the moment and would rather use a more versatile lens that I could shoot a bit wider with. Have you been happy with this setup and the shots you’re getting? How easy or hard is it to use?

Thanks,

Atom65

You'll probably struggle to get half life size with 30mm macro. Life size will be almost on the port.  Even half life size will be uncomfortably close and not as easy to light.

Thanks folks, glad I haven't bought it yet! Will have to consider going the metabones route or perhaps adding a close up wet lens to the standard kit lens... I do have a 100mm canon macro lens but not sure I’m willing to take it underwater. 

Copy/paste of my post on a similar thread over on ScubaBoard:

I'll add my $0.02 here and throw in the Tamron 35mm F/2.8 M1:2 for consideration. It's a really sharp lens, with pretty fast AF on my a6400. I'm using a Salted Line a6xxx housing and the Flat Short Port meant for the 16mm f/1.4 Sigma. There's some space (I think I measured about 13mm extra space between the lens front and port glass), but at 35mm you don't see any vignetting. While it's only half-macro, that's a pretty good choice for those getting into macro for the first time. 

The really nice thing is that 35mm is a nice length for fish portraits, and you end up with a pretty versatile setup. The photos below are all from the same day of diving, with no changes in setup. For the most part they are full crops of the frames, ordered from smallest to largest subjects to give you an idea of the range of the lens is capable of. I could add a wet diopter too if I wanted to boost my repro ratio. I think I'd need a +10 to hit 1:1, not accounting for flat port magnification.

The Sony 30 macro is a good choice as a 'general purpose' lens for Sony A6xxx cameras. It is cheap to buy new, or you could find a used one, try it out, and resell it if you don't like it, without losing much money.

As others have said, working distance is very short once you get into true macro territory. However, lighting is not too difficult even then, with small strobes. It was my "go to" lens when I first migrated from FF (Nik D800E) to APSC (A6500, now A6400), with 2 x Inon S2000 strobes.

The main problem with this lens is that if you like shooting small active subjects (e.g. gobies) as I do, you will be well inside their comfort zone by the time you get close enough for a decent pic. Which means endless stalking, or waiting ages for that one individual braver than the rest! For fish 100mm and over, no problem.

I don't use my 30mm so much now, as I've split my "go to" lenses these days into two: a Sony/Zeiss 24mm behind a mini dome for general purpose stuff, or a Zeiss Touit 50mm macro for most macro (and general purpose if the viz is OK). Both of these perform their respective tasks brilliantly, but are expensive, so def. worth looking for good used examples (I bought mine from Japanese resellers on ebay).

Two caveats with the Zeiss Touit 50: check that it has version 2 of the firmware installed. While this is a free upgrade which can only be done by selected Zeiss agents, it will take a month or so...

And preferably only use it with the later A6xxx cameras, i.e. A6400 or A6600. The AF is slow with earlier bodies and significantly better with the later ones. The AF improvement was the reason I upgraded from A6500 to A6400 (unfortunately that also required a change of housing...)

I like the Touit 50 so much that if I ever "upgraded" to FF Sony (unlikely, but never say never...), I would keep it to use in crop mode, noting that its AF would be even better with the latest fancy pants FF Sonys.