First foray int cheap micro world

[arlon]

Just a proof of concept.
Here are a few shots of a lantana flower. Click on any picture for the original/larger size pic. Flash for all was an old Nikon SB-20 set on 1/8 power and all shots hand held. Beauty of this rig is I can use it in the yard. No stage, no tripod, no special lights, no bellows, no worries..

Here's a lantana shot with the 40mm enlarger lens with a mm scale. Flower is about 5mm wide (cropped and resized) just to show what I went after with the microscope lens.



Stepping up to a microscope lens:
This is cropped and resized of about the full frame.



Here is a 100% sized crop (100% if you click for the original) showing the individual cells in the petal.



And here's my $30 lens setup mounted directly onto the D200.. Short extension tube, Nikon K2 ring and a metal lens cap..

[Charles Krebs]

Arlon...

Don't forget, if you want an image from the microscope objective that has a likelihood of filling the sensor "edge to edge" with good results you'll need more extension than you show here. I can't see what type of 10X it is, but it was likely designed to have 160mm of extension. The Nikon "flange to film/sensor" distance is 46.5mm. So you need at least 113.5mm from the Nikon mount to the "shoulder" of the microscope objective. It's not necessary to be exact. But if you use less, the corners will be dark or have poor image quality. With more, the magnification will be higher than the objective is marked (but corner resolution may appear to improve).

[arlon]

The middle picture is basically the full frame and you can certainly see the light fall off in the corners. More extension might be good but it would also mean more magnification and be harder to get a hand held shot from. I have a box full of extensions so I'll try adding another and another and see what happens. Thanks for the 160mm number. Wondered what a microscope was supposed to be. I can at least try getting close to see what happens.

I need to come up with a stage/platform for it next. Handheld is fun but a bit of a pain too..

[rjlittlefield]

Thanks for the 160mm number. Wondered what a microscope was supposed to be.

The number is normally engraved on the objective, something like 160/0.17, where the 0.17 means that the lens was designed for cover glass that is 0.17 mm thick. A few objectives have something different, but most of the old ones were 160. The notation "160" means 160 mm tube length, that is, 160 mm from the shoulder of the objective threads to the top of the eyepiece tube. The objective is actually designed to focus 10 mm below that, so the optical extension from sensor to shoulder of the threads is designed to be 150 mm. For low power objectives like you're using, the actual distance is not critical except for the field-of-view issue that you and Charlie are already discussing. It may well be that your D200 has enough pixels to capture all the detail the lens can project even at your current magnification. If so, then more extension would give you less vignetting/cropping but no real improvement in the final image. A bit of experimenting should tease that out.

Your image look good to me. I can hardly wait to see the ants-rushing-about shots!

--Rik

PS. Don't worry about the cover glass issue either. Again, for these low power, small aperture objectives, cover glass wouldn't make any difference you could see.

[Harold Gough]

It's looking good. It might be instructive to try it on a subject with a fairly full spectrum of colour.

Harold

[arlon]

lens is marked 10/0.25 and 160/0.17. Thanks for telling me what that meant.

I did shoot part of a business card. It shows the fiber of the card quite clearly. Black and white showed pretty well.

resized full from:


click the below image for a 100% sized crop of the letter E.