Swirly experiment?

There's a piece of camera equipment called a focal reducer that's the opposite of a teleconverter. What it does is takes the image produced by a lens designed for a larger image sensor and shrinks it down to match a smaller sensor. (Think of it like moving a projector closer to the screen; the image gets smaller, but brighter.)

There are three main reasons for doing so: it gives you more light (so you can take pics in dimmer light); it lets cameras with smaller sensors use more of the image produced by the lens (normally a smaller sensor crops the image, effectively magnifying it); and ideally, shrinking the image makes it sharper, if the optics were designed well.

This was taken with a focal reducer which... well, it's from a good name-brand manufacturer, but they admitted they had a problem with this production run: “We have discontinued this product and are offering it at a deep discount. The optic in this adapter creates a really soft glow with any lens. This adapter has more artistic properties than technical (as intended when sold) but can be used as a normal adapter by removing the optic.” They were selling it at a very steep discount to get them out of inventory, so I figured, 'why not try it'?

The above pic was taken with the lens fairly wide-open; the subject flower isn't terribly sharp, but you get interesting bokeh (out-of-focus look).

This pic stops the lens down 2-3 steps:



- and while you lose some of the out-of-focus 'artistic effect', I think the flower turned out pretty sharp - some nice 'pop' away from the background.