More of a 'technical' PAW than enything else, but an interesting image (IMO) captured with a rather different technique.
http://davidavid.whatsbeef.net/eyes.jpg
What you're looking at is an image of a stick insect's eye(s), rather magnified. It was more of a test of what I could do than anything else. It does, however, illustrate the old 'pupil of an insect' illusion rather well (frank asked about this once).
My estimate is that magnification was about 6:1
The setup I used was an A 50mm f2 reversed in front of my A* 300mm f4. The 50mm was at f5.6, the 300mm was at f8 (though stopping down this lens didn't appear to change anything until about f11 when vignetting occurred). Tripod, MLU and all that. I did do a fair bit of sharpening in PS.
The obvious deficiency of the photo is the extremely limited DOF. I believe that this is unavoidable at this sort of magnification (at least with this primitive setup). I also noticed that stopping down the 50mm more resulted in funny rainbow-like starbursts in OOF highlights. Diffraction?
I had a quick go at taking several slices with the intention to stitch them for a big DOF, but ran into some difficulties (allignment, getting the right bit in focus, moving the whole setup). No good results, but it's promising.
Anyway, I'm keen for comments. One thing that I'd like to know more about is using one of those old RMS thread lenses for this kind of stuff. If only pentax made an equivalent of Canon's MPE-65! (a macro with the range of 1x to 5x magnification unaided). Probably fodder for a new thread.
Regards, David
