It really depends on what you are photographing. As has been noted each of these lenses has a fairly limited range of magnification for which it's designed. So it does not hurt to have several. Any of the ones I have are good within their design range.lauriek wrote:Walt with your experience with all of these similar macro lenses, are there any particularly stellar performers to keep an eye out for?
I also used the older tessars, the B&L Micro Tessars and the Zeiss designs, but mostly with 4x5 sheet film. Kind of hard to extend that experience to modern setups.
There is a Canon 20mm on ebay right now. Always something going on there. The ultimate place for rare stuff.I figured the RMS adapter it came with would enable me to easily test out a bunch of cheapo microscope objectives as well so I'll be trawling ebay for the next few months (Ha, not that I ever seem to stop trawling ebay for something!!!)
I've not really found microscope objectives to be all that good except when used with the proper lighting system on a microscope. But I suppose that might change with stacking. As has been noted, they have awfully narrow DOF.
I'm just setting up to get into stacking, got a mount made and software ready. I'm setting up for working in the field as I'm often a very long way from home base.
If you want to have some fun with these lenses, set them up with a good ringflash and go out shooting handheld. Here's a shot from ten years ago, shot with the Minolta RD175, Canon 35mm, 1200 ringflash and handheld. The young tick was running flat out across a piece of cardboard:
Walt
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