Macro Photography for Beginners: Microscope and Camera.

When you want to get way past 1:1 and look at those scales on butterfly wings then there is no real alternative but to get the camera onto a microscope. This is not macro photography but photomicrography, the results are interesting and spectacular and relatively easy once you have the adapter (and the microscope) so it was appropriate to include this item. A good enough microscope to try this will cost less than a good lens. If you do get keen and buy a microscope, make sure beforehand that an adapter for your camera is available and order it at the same time and make sure it all works together before you part with your money.
Again a custom adapter is needed, usually the microscope maker has various common camera brand adapters available. Otherwise you have to seek or make a camera mount that will slide in a light tight fashion over the eyepiece tube. I found an old fashioned East German made microscope adapter on a camera store specials table. It fitted the microscope eyepiece tube OK but only provided an old Exacta bayonet fitting. Luckily it was made up of a combination of screwed sections, so I made an adapter (a metal lathe is very handy!) for a Nikon T-mount so that the T-mount would now screw onto the top of the microscope adapter and the camera body goes onto the T-mount. All lens filter and camera attachment threads so far seem to be 0.75mm pitch, by the way.

For different magnifications you can usually use the setup with or without the eyepiece. Some eyepieces will provide only a narrow field so you will get vignetting of various degrees. The best eyepiece to use is a deliberately designed wide field, flat field type.

Once you have the camera on the microscope, you will need aperture priority mode when you use the microscope lamp or manual mode with a cabled TTL flash. Magnification is up to you but be aware the light falls off dramatically and the flash may indicate underexposure so you have to move it even closer to the subject. If using the normal microscope lamp then introduce a blue filter into the light so some correction will be made for the yellow incandescent lamp output.

Also depth of field is measured in fractions of a millimetre so you have to arrange subject material carefully. Once I tried this years ago with an early model centre weighted TTL ambient light meter SLR and it was not very successful. When I got my Nikon N8008s I started to get great results, the exposures were perfect every time with either microscope lamp or flash. I guess the more modern light metering will handle the low light levels better.

Upside. Want to photograph a bee`s knee?
Downside. Can be costly and cumbersome, very shallow depth of field. Adapter parts may have to be searched for or made specially. Things need to be very dead, ever tried chasing a live ant using a microscope?