Polaroid Macro Lens Attachment Review

Sometimes you just know. From the first moment, you feel it in your heart, an almost magnetic draw. You feel weak with desire and you know that you’re going to surrender. You whisper, “Together, we will experience so many beautiful moments. With you, I will see the world in a new way. I want you. I need you. I must have you. Plus, you’re totally affordable and compatible with my existing lenses”.

And that’s the moving tale of how I met my Polaroid Studio Series .43x wide angle lens with macro attachment on Amazon*. The one I linked to is the exact one I bought, sold as Sony-compatible because it comes with an adapter ring which makes it fit a bunch of Sony lenses. You can get the same piece of kit for just about any brand of camera and size of lens – all the compatibility is down to the adapter ring that comes with it.

Although this is a wide angle WITH macro, I’m going to focus on the macro attachment today (I’ll get to the wide angle option at a later date when I’ve had a chance to play with it). All you do to get up (very) close and personal is unscrew the macro attachment from the wide angle lens, add the adapter ring, then attach it to whatever lens you want to use. And guess what? Autofocus works through the macro attachment! Obviously it’s personal preference whether you want to use auto or manual focus, but it’s good to have options and fun if you like to go off-tripod (like I do) or have hands that get really shaky when you’re tired (also like I do).

To be honest, I wasn’t expecting this to be amazing. After all, it’s seriously inexpensive. I thought it’d be kind of alright and really just bought it because I like having new toys to play with. I set up some small shiny things on a windowsill to take advantage of the lovely early evening light (ok, I was too lazy to set up any lighting) and started to shoot.

First of all, here’s a very much not artistic reference photo to show you the still life arrangement I was working with. I took this photo with an 18-55mm lens on my Sony Alpha A550.

This picture is straight-out-of-camera, so basically converted from RAW to jpeg with absolutely no adjustments made to the RAW file to change its appearance.

This picture is the processed version, with colour and saturation adjustments made during RAW processing to make everything look a bit warmer and brighter, mostly because that’s the opposite of how skull-like things are usually depicted.

I’m not joking when I say I absolutely ADORE this little piece of glass. I shot with a fairly wide aperature (f5.6) and the resulting bokeh was stunning. I cannot even express how inspired I’m feeling right now about experimenting with different materials, textures and colours. At the risk of sounding like I’m giving an acceptance speech, I want to thank my parents. They gave me the beautiful Butler and Wilson shoulder brooch and my mum, who is a talented lady, made the beaded jewellery that I used as a background.

I know that if I spent a couple of hundred pounds on a macro lens I might get better results or different results or something else that would justify spending literally ten times more than I paid for this little gem, but I can honestly say I’m beyond satisfied with what £24.99 has bought me. Having never tried macro photography before and knowing that it’s unlikely to be a great money-making venture for me at any point, I was really just looking for something affordable and simple to produce artistic close-up photos with. I’m pretty sure I found it.

Prints of the finished image are available at http://www.deviantart.com/print/38388122/

_{*You might notice on the Amazon listing that the price is £24.99. That is the amount that I paid. For some reason, which I am not daft enough to question, my order arrived with a telephoto lens fitting as well, all in one sealed package. So I got a bonus telephoto lens and you’ll get a bonus product review once I’ve tried it out.}

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