Shooting macro with a wide angle lens

I am a beginner and I recently bought the Nikon D80 with a bunch of accessories, including a Merkury Optics 58MM

0.45x wide angle lens,which has an option for macro 15:1 ratio on it. I did not purchase an actual macro lens. I am

very intersted in shooting close up, ie: flowers, insects, etc...

Will I be able to use this wide angle lens to shoot macro? I am a bit confused, and I am hoping to be able to do this

without purchasing an additional lens. What does the macro option mean on a wide angle lens?

The other lenses I got were the Tamron 28-80mm, the Tamron 75-300MM, and a 2x telephoto lens for 55MM.

Thank you!

JS, yes, You can shoot macro with wide angle lenses. But the sharpness of close-focusing wide-angle-lenses will not

match real macro-lenses. You will see a lot of distortion too, if You shoot a stamp or so. I have never seen Your Merkury-

lens but i think it is some kind of close-up-lens to screw into the filter-thread on Your Tamron-lens. If You are serious about

shooting macro think about bying a real macro-lens. Tamron builds a nice 90mm-lens, Nikon offers two 60mm-lenses, a

105mm-lens and some specialised Tilt-Shift-lenses. Sigma and Tokina selling nice optics too. I own a Sigma 24/1.8 - a

wide-angle-lens with close-focusing abilities. This is a nice feature for shooting flowers or so but most insects dont like a

frontlens upclose. Try the Merkury and see if it works for You - if not, see if You can try some lenses in a good photostore.

Have fun and excuse my english, georg.

That Merkury Optics attachment appears to be similar to a popular design, also often sold for video cameras. I have one in a box somewhere. If the design is the same as mine the macro lens portion may be detachable from the wide angle adapter. If the two components are threaded together, you can try using only the closeup lens component without the wide angle segment.

Usually the optical quality of these add-on devices is a compromise. But they're interesting to experiment with and a cost effective way to help you decide whether you're interested enough in closeup photography to consider buying a true macro lens later on.

Most of these wide adapters that also do macro have a removable lens element that you take remove for use as a closeup lens. I'm guessing that you will have to do that for macro with it. As Georg s says, you can expect to see a lot of distortion, and probably a lot of softness at the edges of the image. Stopping down to f/16 helps. But cheer up, the distortion and soft edges will be even worse when the adapter is used in it's wide mode. :) The results from these things are amazingly poor. I'm not sure why they still sell them.

The newer Tamron 70-300's have a 1:2 macro mode that is accessible at the 300mm zoom setting. Does your's have that? Although not great, it would be a far better macro lens than the 0.45x adapter when used in macro mode.