The Most Interesting Accessory You Will Never Use

I recently had lunch with a fellow photographer, someone I have known since 1985. We talked about everything, but, as is true about most photographers, we mostly talked about photography.

At the end of lunch, he handed me a box that look like it had just appeared in a time machine from that same year, 1985. Inside was an accessory I knew about, but never owned: a bellows and rail lens mount, known simply as a bellows.

This accessory allows a photographer to focus closer that most lenses, even macro lenses, into the realm of extreme close-up macro photography.

The bellows consists of a pair of rails with gears on them, an expandable cloth (or sometimes plastic) “bellows” section, a mount for a lens on one end and a camera on the other, and a knob for moving the lens and the camera closer together or father apart. When you turn the knobs, the bellows resembles playing an accordion.

At first, you might think, “Wow, now I can take crazy pictures of crazy stuff crazy up-close.” But it’s not that simple. Here are some things to know about the bellows setup.

1. Most lenses already focus pretty close, and macro lenses already focus very, very close, so the bellows setup takes this whole idea to the next level.
2. The camera and the lens aren’t actually connected, so there is no communication between the two, so exposure is completely manual.
3. The aperture of the lens isn’t connected to the camera, or anything else, so you will need to open the aperture all the way up to focus, then “stop down” to a much smaller setting to take the photo. Thus, the only real way to make it work is to use a lens with a manual aperture ring.
4. Extending the bellows even a short distance make the image in the viewfinder fairly dark, so be prepared to have your patience, and eyesight, tested. The exception to this are mirrorless cameras, which will hopefully amplify the view when it shows it to you on the display.
5. Since the image is so dark, you will need a sturdy tripod, and a non-moving subject.
6. Since the image is so dark, you will need a sturdy tripod, and a non-moving subject.
7. Depth-of-field at these crazy magnifications is as thin as a promise, so to get anything like sharp results, you need to make the image at a very small aperture, and even then, depth-of-field will still be razor-thin.
8. Most lenses aren’t optimized for these kinds of magnifications, and your images will often be littered with aberrations like purple fringing, softness at the corners, and distortion.

With all that said, I will hang on to this oddity. If someone gives you one of these, it’s worth hanging onto, but don’t go out of your way to buy one. Even a decent macro lens can sometimes sit on a shelf until the marigolds are in bloom, so the bellows might never see the light of day after the first time you try it.

I played with mine for a while, and struggled to get results, but what I was able to get was interesting.