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Super Macro #2
By sirsnapalot | January 30, 2010
Continuing on my macro journey to push the limits as far as I can, I went to eBay to see if I could find a better 28mm lens (the old FD mount)- one by Canon, instead of the cheap Albinar lens I bought 20 years ago when I was poorer and cheap. Albinar lenses were not good quality, and they don’t age well. I decided to buy a Canon-brand 28mm lens, as they can be had on eBay for $20-30.
I found out though, that Canon also made a 24mm lens. If you remember from older Macro articles, when you flip the lens around, the wider the angle of the lens forwards, the more it magnifies backwards. If I was going to purchase an old school lens for my macro project, I might as well not only improve the quality by buying Canon brand, but why not boost the magnification as well?
It turns out that the old 24mm lenses were rarer, and therefore were fetching higher prices on eBay- sometimes over $100. I bid on one, and lost it. I decided I didn’t want to get into a bidding war with anyone, so I waited until another one came on and tried again. I bid, and had the high bid for a few days, then got outbid. Here, I changed tactic. I waited… watching others bid a few dollars more here and there, and then waited until 10 seconds before the auction ended, and bid $70 (I did not want to pay more than that). By waiting until 10s, you don’t give anyone else a chance to respond and outbid you- it’s called sniping. I ended up getting a good, 24mm FD Mount lens for old Canon cameras for $51, so not bad!
Remember, we’re flipping the lens around backwards for macro work, so the mount really doesn’t matter. In fact, I could have just as easily used a Nikon lens on my Canon body.
When I got the lens, I found out it was 55mm in diameter, whereas my reversing ring adapter is 52mm. I needed a 55-52mm step up ring (step up attaches a smaller diameter to a larger lens, and step down does the opposite). So I ordered (from eBay again) the pile of step up and step down rings you saw in the previous article. One of those rings was my 52->55mm adapter.
Insect eye at 340x magnification
I was almost shocked that it worked this well. To be fair, this required some work. It is focus stacked first off- macro has a very shallow depth of field, and the higher the magnification, the thinner the plane of focus. It was taken with 14 pictures taken at very slightly different focus points to get sharpness, top to bottom. There is free software called CombineZ that will do this for you.
Since I paid for some other software called Photo Acute, which also does focus stacking, I used that instead. It also will use multiple pictures to increase the resolution further, so I got two benefits here- increased depth of field and increased resolution. The “raw” magnification of that new (well, old) 24mm lens backwards on the end of my bellows, is 675x. Doubling with Photo Acute led to 1350x, but really, it is not as usable as you might think. From there, I resized to this size (click on picture to see the best view on Flickr) and got a very good 340x. (“Raw” vs. “Usable” magnification will be discussed in a future article.)
Bug Size Reference
For scale, here is a picture of that bug next to something you’re familiar with. You get an idea of how tiny that eye really is. I’m really looking forward now to spring, when the bugs start to come out. I really want to zoom in on a housefly, with their marvelous, compound eyes.
I was pretty excited by these results, so I kept taking pictures of things. It’s very difficult to find your subject when it magnified so much- not to mention, it’s very dim in the viewfinder. I have some tips how to make that task easy in a future post as well (I need to take some decent pictures of the setup to demonstrate it). One thought was to photograph something that didn’t need a light source- the lit display of my mobile phone.
LCD Pixels
Believe it or not, these are actual Red, Blue and Green pixels on the display of my Nokia E71. I had no idea they were shaped this way. I had done some macro LCD before (never to this detail), but they appeared to be straight bars of light, so I was excited to see something new and unexpected here.
I’ll be posting more experiments, and of course, results of any further improvements in my macro adventures.
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