Lichen-covered twig sliced through with a razor blade and focus-stacked using various Mitties. Lichen is one of the few subjects that looks more interesting at lower magnifications IMO (at macro scales). Surprised how much it "self shadows" though - blocking light from a very large proportion of its...

Beatsy, these are really tiny fragile cloud forest orchids that wilt within minutes in a home environment even if they are left on the plant. Gotcha. It was just a thought. Should be a great sense of achievement when you do capture the details you're after! Out of interest - how do you transport th...

It depends what flower parts you want to shoot but is it possible to fashion a mini "vase" and keep them hydrated that way? I hit the wilting problem trying to stack Scarlet Pimpernels (flowers about 1.5mm across). In the end I kept 1cm stalks on them which stood in a 2ml plastic centrifuge vial stu...

lolhonk wrote:Nice work! What kind oft tube lens do you use with your 10x Mitty?

Thanks. For this subject I used a Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 L telephoto lens set at 200mm. I now use a 135mm Vivitar/Komine lens (M42 fit) for 6.75x onto a full frame sensor with negligible vignetting.

Thanks for the responses. g4lab: it could be something to do with keyence as they claim 10x more DoF than an equivalent microscope and the DoF was the first thing that struck me. Having said that - I still can't find anything matching the lens pictured. johan: no, the "operator" is a youngish lookin...

I was watching an excellent program called "Oak Tree: Nature's greatest survivor" (again) and noticed an amazing lens used for macro filming. The programme is currently available on BBC iPlayer and the lens is shown, and used, at around 1:16:00. I think content may be blocked outside the UK, so I sc...

I've been using Mitutoyo objectives almost exclusively for the past few weeks. New toys and all that. But I had reason to use my MP-E 65 last night (testing DoF for stack step sizing at lower mags) and was reminded just how good the MP-E really is. I don't think any other macro-oriented lens even be...

Looks wonderful. I want one! What is it?

Thanks Lou - I clocked that warning in the instructions. I tend to run in a very short range, never more than 30mm travel, and predominantly <10mm so fairly low risk. Having said that, I managed to get it confused so it ignored the "end point" and continued moving and taking pics a couple of times. ...

...How long does it take to process a picture like this, from start to end? For these images it wasn't too bad. I was using APS-C crop mode on the camera, shooting JPG instead of RAW and I set Zerene to 'pre scale' the images by 50% during stacking. So files sizes were pretty small. Overall, it was...

This unexpected "abstract" presented itself while I was tinkering with a micro aquarium containing a bit of pond weed - just some bubbles that were stuck to the glass. A single shot with a 10x mitty - cropped for composition.

Here's the first part of trying to do a less subjective test of the effect of an intervening cover slip on Mitty performance. I say "trying" because I appear to be cursed. When I use a 10x Mitty, or anything with lower magnification, nothing stirs outside my house except perhaps an occasional pedest...

Only shallow with the 50x - from coverslip inside surface to about 0.2mm deeper. I didn't take that test further due to limited FoV but will be testing further. I'll report back (in techniques section) when I've more comparison pics done.

Interesting. They are definitely of organic origin. But from which kind of organisms? Foraminifers? Corals? Echinoderms? Troels You were right with your first try - they're foraminifera. I forgot to mention - the images above were from a test of photographing through glass with a 10x mitty. I glued...

...which can be quite interesting in it's own way. Then there's star sand from Japan - definitely in a league of it's own. Both images to the same scale covering a FoV 3.5mm wide. Stacks of 120 and 150 images respectively, taken with a 10x mitty. http://www.photomacrography.net/forum/userpix/3490_no...