Topic: Extension Tubes for Closeups in Brickfilming
One thing I've been looking into recently is the use of extension tubes to achieve closer focusing in brickfilms. Essentially, an extension tube allows you to mount a lens (usually a manual lens) further from the sensor, which reduces the minimum focal distance. It's commonly done in macro photography, and yet I've not heard of people doing it in brickfilming.
Normally when people want closeups here, my understanding is that we all use diopters, which are basically small lenses that you place on the front of your main lens to reduce the focal distance. The downside of these is that they are often low-quality glass, and produce aberrations and other undesirable distortions. If you're shooting on a nice Nikkor prime lens, it's really a shame to have that quality loss for closeups.
I've looked around and found some LEGO photography using extension tubes, and it all looks pretty good -- notably, it tends to look cleaner and not have that distorted diopter look that I see in a lot of brickfilms.
The image below demonstrates some of what I'm talking about as far as diopter distortion, notice the warped, fuzzy edges on the left:
Whereas extension tube photos I've found never have that kind of distortion:
Of course, this only really works if you are working with manual lenses (or want to shell out the cash for electronic extension tubes), but I thought I'd see if anybody has tried using extension tubes in a brickfilm. I recently purchased a cheap Fotodiox set of extension tubes, I'm excited to see what I can do with them in a brickfilming context once I get a chance.
