Extreme Macro shots with stacked lenses

[yorgasor]

Ok, we've got snow here again! Unfortunately, my nice macro sliding rail is still in the mail. UPS screwed up, it was supposed to have been here by now I'm making do with what I have though. I have a new light source, a home made dimmable LED light source, using a steel mixing bowl with a strip of 600 LEDs wound around inside and a translucent lid to give a nice, soft, even light. I'm loving it!

Anyway, the snow falling seems to be more like ice chunks falling than pretty crystalline figures. Here's my best photo of the night so far (I may go out and take some more photos when I finish thawing out)


snow flake by yorgasor, on Flickr

 

[TheJock]

This is an image of the set up I mentioned earlier.
The "wind up" handle on the smaller tripod works well in small increments to aid focus, I imagine you could stack the images!
I have a 8" square of foam board that sits on top of the small tripod, this acts as the platform to sit the objects to be photographed.
Hope it helps ???

 

[IMG_0001]

Has anyone tried a lab scissor jack like this one for example:
http://www.amazon.com/American-Educational-Laboratory-Scissor-Overall/dp/B00657ZTIU
?

This would be quite cheap and allow for precision in movement while taking care of the table rotation problem. Of course a good macro rail would be better and easier to use from the camera side, but they are expensive for poor blokes like me...

 

[btaoka]

Last fall I came across some super amazing macro shots of snowflakes up close. I instantly fell in love with the concept and started working on learning how to do it myself. With a reverse stacked lens, your magnification is a divisor of the front lens and the reverse stacked lens. So, for higher magnification you want a larger lens connected to the camera and a smaller lens reverse stacked on the front.

I'm using a Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 lens, a 1.4x III extender, a reverse lens adapter ring and a Nikon 24mm f/2 AIS lens. This gives me a magnification of 280 / 24 = 11.66x! For light, I'm using a 580EX Speedlight connected via an ETTL cable so I can position it however I need to. This combination is really dark to see to focus, so sometimes I'll turn up my cell phone brightness. I'm really just getting started, my first few photos were done hand-held, trying to position my cell phone light and the flash while hand holding the camera and moving in or out to focus. This is the method I used last night when we got a little bit of snow and ice in NC. I got these shots from the top of our garbage can:


Frozen Crystals by yorgasor, on Flickr


_MG_1129 by yorgasor, on Flickr

If you like snowflakes take a look at the flickr page of this guy from Moscow
http://www.flickr.com/photos/chaoticmind75/sets/72157626146319517/

It’s even more impressive if you see how he gets these results with an old Canon PowerShot A650 and an even older reversed Helios 44M-5 lens.
http://chaoticmind75.blogspot.nl/2013/08/my-technique-for-snowflakes-shooting.html

Hi yorgasor, 100,

I realize this thread is about stacked lenses, but I just wanted to show you that you don't need a special setup to get snowflake photos. I saw the same article and series of photos from that Russian guy several months ago and was also inspired. I saw the kind of rig he had set up, and was too lazy to do anything like that. It took a few snowstorms, but I got this photo from Storm Janus a few weeks ago:

The Silver Lining of Storm Janus by btaoka, on Flickr
The Russian guy's snowflake photos have more DOF and detail to them, but this was taken from my 100L macro (i.e. 1:1 magnification), no focus stacking, just a single shot. No special lighting either, ambient light used.

 

[Dick]

The Silver Lining of Storm Janus by btaoka, on Flickr
The Russian guy's snowflake photos have more DOF and detail to them, but this was taken from my 100L macro (i.e. 1:1 magnification), no focus stacking, just a single shot. No special lighting either, ambient light used.

Decent quality there! Why did you do as the Russian and put the flakes in some pubes or something similar? That was the only thing that bugged me in his photos when I saw them the first time.

 

[btaoka]

The Silver Lining of Storm Janus by btaoka, on Flickr
The Russian guy's snowflake photos have more DOF and detail to them, but this was taken from my 100L macro (i.e. 1:1 magnification), no focus stacking, just a single shot. No special lighting either, ambient light used.

Decent quality there! Why did you do as the Russian and put the flakes in some pubes or something similar? That was the only thing that bugged me in his photos when I saw them the first time.

Haha yeah I didn't think of it that way, but now every time I see photos like this I will . The main reason to use some kind of cloth is you need something that doesn't conduct heat at all. Metal is the worse and glass can somewhat conduct heat as well. If you put snowflakes on either of those two surfaces, they'll probably melt away before you even take the photo.