Category Archives: Extreme Macro Techniques

Arduino, Extreme Macro Lighting, Extreme Macro Techniques

Playing With DigiSpark

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I was thinking about building a delay circuit quickly and effectively and with small footprint. The idea is to delay a signal either from a camera or from other camera triggering devices and then trigger a flash after the delay.

Beside my need to build such a circuit, it is also my goal to share it and make it DIYable. Therefore, using a small microchip came up to my mind. One such MCU is Attiny45 series by Atmel (now Microchip) as it is so popular and you can use an Arduino to program it. While searching for Attiny45, I came across something that I have forgotten — DigiSpark boards!  Continue reading Playing With DigiSpark →

Extreme Macro, Extreme Macro Lighting, Extreme Macro Techniques

Analysis Of Misalignment Between Optical And Motion Axis For Focus Stacking.

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I have been asked many times about why there are streaking patterns around border of final stacked image. Well, the most common cause of these streaking patterns is due to the optical instruments used — the magnification of optical instrument changes when the distance between the subject and sensor changes. When stacking algorithm attempts to align all images, there will be mismatch of subject size. Information in one image just does not exist in another, thus stacking software often fills the final image with some arbitrary (arbitrarily chosen) pixels. However, if a telecentric optical instrument is used, due to the nature of telecentricity, there is no change in magnification, therefore there should be no or very little streaking patterns. But many still get streaking patterns even when a telecentric optical instrument is used. What gives? Here is why!

Streaking

 

Continue reading Analysis Of Misalignment Between Optical And Motion Axis For Focus Stacking. →

Extreme Macro Lighting, Extreme Macro Techniques

Hazy Stack? Watch Your Diffusion Setup.

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Admit it, you have encountered this, after so much effort capturing images for stacking and painfully waiting for stacking software to finish, you ended up with an image with a lot of haze. So much so, your skillful Photoshop tricks can’t help it. Oh OK, sometimes Photoshop does help, but I still believe to get it right at the first place.

Setup_08So what happened? What happened is that your diffusion setup is causing light beams entering your lens, causing glare and haze. read more

Extreme Macro Lighting, Extreme Macro Techniques

Diffuse Your Light, Or Else!

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OK, that sounds a bit harsh. Then again, almost every (extreme) macro photographer knows this and tries very hard to put as much diffusion as possible. Just visit any Facebook group about macro photography or any forum, you will find talks of diffusion in abundance, there are all kind of setups to diffuse light, all kind of DIY and professional equipment, there are . . . So, yeah, we get it for sure, now go away! Cool, it is almost everybody gets it, but here I am going to present you an extreme example of what would happen if you do NOT diffuse your light!  read more

Extreme Macro Lenses, Extreme Macro Techniques

Checking Microscope Objective Chromatic Aberration

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What is chromatic aberration for an optical system? Well, according to Wiki, it is the failure of a lens to focus all colors to the same convergence point. You usually see this effect when you have high contrast edges in your image. Well, it happens not just with microscope objectives, you will also see this effect with normal photographic lenses, for example along the edges of a mountain and the sky. But I will focus on this for microscope objectives as it is rather important.

CACheckMitutoyo QV 2.5x 0.14, a 5x 0.15 “APO”, and a generic 4x PLAN objective. read more

Extreme Macro Techniques

Say What? Using A Speaker As Stacking Stage For High Magnification Work?! Part I

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Yes, you heard it right, you can use an audio speaker as stacking stage for high magnification work. It was during the Chinese new year when almost all businesses are shut down for almost two weeks in China, my speaker for PC was behaving strangely, after all, I have been using the pair for about 7 years. So, I started investigating what was wrong. By touching some wire, the speaker made some noise, and since I was testing some setups for high magnification stacking, the movement of speaker cone caused by noise immediately drew my attention: can that movement be used for stacking? I was pretty sure it can and I posted the idea on a forum which drew some attention.

StackRailVC_2PM

After some more experiment on my own with above circuit, I think it is a very viable solution.
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Extreme Macro Techniques

A Nice Microscopy Setup

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Be honest to you, I have neither owned a microscope, nor have I used one extensively. However a recent quest to shoot some butterfly scales at 50x magnification made me build a nice setup capable of doing 50x work using a cheap digital microscope stand. Before this, I have had hard time shooting butterfly scales at high magnification and I was using horizontal setup. First problem is mounting the butterfly vertically, fiddling with specimen holder so that the butterfly is parallel with the objective’s front element, then moving camera back and forth to pre-focus it. Believe me, all of these sound easy to over come, but they are really not. After building the setup discussed here, it is a lot easy and here is one example of it:

SSMW01

The above image was captured using this setup at 30x magnification  read more

Extreme Macro Lenses, Extreme Macro Techniques

Taking Advantage Of High Magnification Objective For Lower Magnification Work

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Whenever you see a specification for a microscope objective, you will likely see the term NA, the numerical aperture value. Many people, particularly beginners in extreme macro photography, ignore or pay less attention to this parameter of an objective, and mainly focus on magnification and (eventually) working distance, but in actuality, the value of NA plays very important role.

ZY135_01

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