Like many folks I sometimes try things just to see what will happen…like my recent 5 tube test.

I was out at the Niagara Butterfly Conservatory last week with one of our readers, Ray Miller, who recently purchased a Nikon 1 J5 along with a couple of Nikon 1 lenses. Ray had an interest in trying out his J5 with some extension tubes so I brought my Delux Vello and MOVO tubes along with me.

Part way through our visit to the conservatory it occurred to me that I had never tried to stack 5 extension tubes together and photograph butterflies hand-held. So I clicked all of my MOVO (10 mm, 16 mm, 21 mm) and Deluxe Vello tubes (10 mm, 16 mm) together into a rather strange looking assembly, and gave it a try.

Ray Miller was kind enough to let me use the image he captured of me using my ‘5 tube’ extension tube set-up, for this article.

Stacking extension tubes together amplifies the magnification effect, but also creates penalties in terms of a loss of light and increasingly shallow depth-of-field. You’ll notice in the EXIF data that I captured all of the images in this article at f/8.

While the images themselves were certainly not award winners, taking them was a really fun experiment.

Capturing some of them also afforded me a few excellent opportunities to practice my J5 hand-holding technique.

As mentioned, all images were captured hand-held in available light. I used single point auto-focus for all of the images.

The next time you’re out with your camera gear and a strange thought enters your head about trying something odd or different – go with the flow! If nothing else you’ll have some fun!

NOTE: The photographs in this article were produced from RAW files using my standard process of DxO OpticsPro 11, CS6 and Nik Suite.

If you enjoyed this article and would like to learn more about the Nikon 1 system, you may want to have a look at our eBook, The Little Camera That Could. It illustrates the capability of the Nikon 1 system through hundreds of original photographs. There is also commentary and tips about the Nikon 1 system. The cost is $9.99 Canadian.

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