Photographer Attaches 20 Extension Tubes to His Camera, Gets Extreme Close-Up Image

A YouTuber attached 20 extension tubes to his camera in a fun experiment to see if he could still get a decent image out of it.

Nicolas Grant has previously attached 10 extension tubes onto his Sony camera so he had to fork out for another 10 to complete this particular video. Extension tubes work by increasing the distance between the camera lens and the camera sensor, this allows the lens to focus much closer to a subject, making it ideal for macro photography.

Extension tubes have no glass inside and are literally just hollow rings that move the lens farther from the sensor, making the focal plane shift closer to the lens. This allows the shooter to focus on things much closer to the lens, as close as a few millimeters or even inside the lens hood.

But adding 20 extension tubes is extreme, to say the least, it means that Grant lost a lot of light, maybe 10 stops or more. He was shooting a microfiber towel and tried to make up for the lost light by shining bright LED light panels on the cloth.

“The problem here is the longer the lens is, the more picture quality you lose because you lose light between the lens and the sensor,” explains Grant. “In an attempt to combat this, I used two lights to light up the towel.”

Grant says he had a tough time keeping his contraption steady but he did manage to get a close-up image of the towel which shows individual fibers. Pretty neat. The image quality isn’t amazing, suffering from noise which is likely due to the high ISO he had to use.

While it’s not a practical tool, as Digital Camera World notes, it does put to bed questions most photographers who have used the extension tubes have asked themselves: ‘how many extension tubes can I get away with using?’

More of Grant’s work can be found on his YouTube channel and Instagram page.