Extreme Dandelion

A couple shots of a droplet of water on a dandelion seed head. Shot using a Sigma 150mm f2.8 macro lens with a reversed Mamiya 55mm f1.8 m42 lens coupled to the front and 36mm of ext tubes.

30 layer stack

8 layer stack

Why only black and white?
The first seems like a significant crop.

The first is black and white but the second is colour, you can just about make a red fibre that escaped my naked eye when I set up the droplet. I backlit the scene to get the high key look and as they have very little colour anyway I though I'd go fully mono for the first shot. The second when I noticed the red fibre I left full colour.

The first shot was cropped a bit to remove some vignetting I was getting with a smaller aperture (f11) whereas the second shot was done at f5.6 without any vignetting(or very little at least).
Here is a layer of the first stack sooc to give you an idea of what it looked like uncropped/ edited.

So, I think this is done with f:11, which affected the resolution of the image.
The inverted lens must be of very good quality and do not exceed f:8 for good results at this magnification.

Yeah, that seems to tally with what I have observed. The reversed 55mm Mamiya Sekor lens is tack sharp and really pretty good, especially considering its age. It gives way better results than the prinzflex 28mm/ Pentacon 135mm combo I have also tried. That is quite a bit more magnification though and I suspect with some of my slowly accumulating know-how it might be worth a revisit at some point in the future with the right subject.

Not the only reason, but one of the reasons I’m here is to see new things/ concepts through the creative eyes/ minds of people who photograph subjects different from what I do (or new to me at least!).

These images certainly fit in that category for me. Really enjoyed the images & the thinking behind them.

(jfW - same for us. 🙂)

In my opinion, the Mamiya Sekor lens is a very good lens for MF, but I don't think it has the separation power of quality lenses for smaller formats.
The Sigma 150mm Macro lens is very good and should give very good results together with a quality reversed lens.

I took for example a small dead insect, and I made some images for comparisons that interest me.
Single image, then 14 stacked, small steps in the middle plane. (6mm FOV)

Many thanks, sounds like we have similar reasons for being here. :)

Really illustrates how shallow the DOF is at these magnifications with that single shot.

When you say small format lenses do you mean ones designed for cropped sensors? I have a 17-55mm Sigma EF-S lens knocking about somewhere which is sharp as a razor but would the image circle cover the sensor on my full frame 5d or does the tube lens(150mm) compensate? I have to say quality-wise the Mamiya seems to be doing pretty well.

I did a couple stacks of a butterfly I have knocking about taking my time with them(still not perfect if you start pixel peeking) and trying to get the lighting right(at least as important as lens quality imho). Think they came out pretty well.

The combination of lenses used by you offers very good results, there is no need to worry further.🙂

I also did a test with a Nikon 18-55mm lens (at 18mm focal length) reversed on the Sigma 90mm macro and it can be seen that it highlights very fine details, although I used ISO 1000, which is not recommended.

The subject is "unusual", but it is rich in very fine details.
4mm FOV, 4 stacked images.
...............................................
You can also try the inverted 17-55mm lens.

Looks like you have a well fed spider lurking nearby... ;)

Yeah I didn't really think that through. Because all the aperture control is done on the reversed lens it would mean using the 17-55 wide open as it has no manual aperture control. Also if using it at anything other than 17mm the rear element retreats into the body so far that the working distance becomes next to nothing. This means even if I could get it close enough to a subject to get focus there would be no room to get light on the subject.( a back lit paper thin subject taped to the rear of the lens might be an exception). I also don't think using it at 17mm on the 150mm is realistic, works out at nearly 9:1 and the dof would be almost unusable I suspect.

Think I will stick to my manual focus lenses for this sort of experimenting. I still have a Cosinon 50 f1.7,Zukio 50 1.8 and a Makinon 24 f2.8 to try out which should keep me entertained for a while. If any of those combos blow me away I will post the results if you're interested.

Wow! What a spectacular view of a Dandelion. One of the most creative Dandelion images ever.
Thanks for sharing,
barondla

Many thanks Barondla!