John Beale
Forum Enthusiast
Impresive! Reminds me of the "matrix" movie. ( I had a chuckle over the thought of the Tokina in the haz-mat bin. 
It's neat that you can combine two ordinary lenses and get a powerful microscope to see all kinds of previously unseen things.
The 44 mm flange height of the EOS mount gives you a reasonable working distance, more than many microscopes with this kind of power. I didn't try flash but of course that's a great way to reduce motion blur. I would still want a solid camera support because it's hard to get the focus right without slooowly creeping up on it. They sell micrometer translation stages for macro work and I can see why.
By the way- if you make a 1:1 macro in this way by using two identical lenses, theory says a whole class of abberations get cancelled out. Distortions to a ray passing forward through one lens get cancelled out when it passes backwards through the second matched lens, resulting in an image that exactly matches the object, even when each lens by itself is not particularly good.
I don't have two identical lenses but even with two different 50mms the 1:1 image is pretty crisp (well, if the subject is exactly flat, and at the focal plane)
It's neat that you can combine two ordinary lenses and get a powerful microscope to see all kinds of previously unseen things.The 44 mm flange height of the EOS mount gives you a reasonable working distance, more than many microscopes with this kind of power. I didn't try flash but of course that's a great way to reduce motion blur. I would still want a solid camera support because it's hard to get the focus right without slooowly creeping up on it. They sell micrometer translation stages for macro work and I can see why.
By the way- if you make a 1:1 macro in this way by using two identical lenses, theory says a whole class of abberations get cancelled out. Distortions to a ray passing forward through one lens get cancelled out when it passes backwards through the second matched lens, resulting in an image that exactly matches the object, even when each lens by itself is not particularly good.
I don't have two identical lenses but even with two different 50mms the 1:1 image is pretty crisp (well, if the subject is exactly flat, and at the focal plane)