Playing with macro

[petrochemist]

Thursday night I spent a few hours playing with different macro options at a friends studio. Using Macro lenses, extension tubes, bellows, diopters, reversed & stacked lenses (including some unusual adapted lenses) or combinations of these. I think we covered most options, both on my A7ii and my friend's Nikon DSLRs.
Some of the crazier options we tried were using a £1 magnifying glass as a diopter (not as good as the raynox but no worse than some of the cheaper 'close-up filters') & combining a 500mm mirror lens, extension tubes (more than 1 set) a macro focusing teleconverter & full stretch of the double extension bellows to get near to 1:1 from about 2m from the subject.

Better results were of course achieved with less radical combinations this was with a Raynox DCR150 on my Cosina 100mm macro:

I'm also rather pleased with the results of my microscope objective (mounted via extended bellows) which manged this shot handheld (the 75 shown is about 3mm across so it's of the order of 10x lifesize):

Not quite square on to the subject but at these magnifications DOF is near zero - so much better than I expected.