Ashok Kandimalla has been in the photographic field for over three decades and has extensive experience in both film and digital photography. Being an electronics engineer by profession and a photographer, he possesses a unique and deep insight into the technical aspects of digital photography and equipment. He has published more than a 100 articles on photography and some of his writings have also been published in the well-known international magazine Popular Photography. An avid collector of photographic books and vintage cameras, Ashok has a keen interest in the history of photography and a passion for sharing his knowledge on photography through teaching and writing. He is the only Indian photographer to be featured on the Nikon Centenary website. He is presently working as a Management and Engineering consutant. He can be reached at kashokk@gmail.com.
Macro
If you are serious about this genre, there is only one type of lens to buy – a dedicated macro lens (Picture 1). Internally a macro lens has a modified focusing mechanism (called a helical) to help some lens elements move farther than the usual designs thus giving close focusing abilities. Many zooms claim to have ‘macro’ capability but that is more due to marketing departments’ description rather than true optical performance. Even if the lens focuses close to 1:3 or even 1:2, it cannot be termed as a macro lens as lenses dedicated to this purpose have flat field performance and are corrected for image capture at very short subject distances (Picture
