DIY macro photography

I’ve been interested in macro photography for a while, partly inspired by one of my cameras (a Panasonic Lumix FZ10) being amazingly good for macro shots with its ordinary lens. For example, this shot was taken from about 10cm from the subject, who is carrying an ordinary housefly:

Karloskar tipped me off to the trick of using a reversed SLR lens held or affixed in front of an ordinary lens to take extreme macro shots (or even micro shots, technically) – a couple of his excellent efforts are here and here.  I am fortunate enough to have my grandfather’s vintage Leicaflex camera and various lenses for it at home, so I thought I’d give it a go.  I also liked the notion that I was combining my modern Lumix (which according to Panasonic has Leica DNA and lens elements in it) with its distant ancestor from my grandfather’s Leicaflex, which he primarily used for nature photography.

Using different length lenses creates inversely proportionally closer macro shots.  That is, a big zoom lens will produce a moderate degree of enlargement, a standard 35 to 50-ish mm lense a larger degree, and a wide angle a huge degree.  Using a 35mm Leitz lens, I was able to magnify a mosquito (which made the mistake of biting me while I was doing this) like this:

A ballpoint pen gives a better idea of the level of enlargement being achieved:

Moving to the 21mm Leitz “Super Angulon-R” (why don’t lenses have names like Japanese robots any more?), the magnification gets even more extreme.  I should note that this was not a particularly large mosquito:

And as for the pen, here it is through the 21mm:

All of this was done by quite literally just holding the relevant lens backwards over the lens of my Panasonic at full zoom, with the aperture on the reversed lens held wide open with my finger.  Needless to say these aren’t exactly ideal shooting conditions, and you can see the problems with light and depth of field (which is effectively zero) in the above pictures.  You also can’t see the numerous complete failures.  Still it’s interesting to see what you can achieve by using fairly standard optics in an unusual way.

A few more: