Not talking clip-ons for cellphones tips here – more like:
What can I do with a $16 pocket digital microscope?
or…
Big bird! Dang. All I have with me is my macro lens!
or..
$40 for an old Power/Coolpix? Could I make that work?
Turned out the answer to that last question was: quite a lot! It was an old Nikon Coolpix P90 from the thrift store ($40). But to make it work for macro, I epoxied a filter adapter to the end of the lens and clipped in a Raynox-250 macro lens that I picked up from the same store for $30. Only other change was adding 4 layers of clear frosted tape over the camera flash glass. My first trip with this combo, I scored a very rare (for Ontario) shot of an Elephant Mosquito (Toxorhynchites rutilus).
Situation two. A ‘what-the-heck’ situation.
Shooting bugs all day with my DSLR (Sony A6300) with an old Laowa 100mm manual macro lens. A lens that fortunately, can actually ‘act’ like a 100mm zoom as it pulls out to infinity. So when I rounded the creek bend…
Cheapy kids ‘microscope’? This one looks like this:
You can see the little tick there. There are a LOT of problems with these little toy scopes as a useable macro cam, but as a combo ‘cheapy’ and a ‘WTH’ situation, having one tucked in a pocket when your macro cam battery dies, or the SD card bites it… What The Heck?
Perhaps the biggest problem is the extremely shallow DOF and a lens to subject distance of almost zero. You have to be right on top of the subject. Nonetheless, for a dead specimen at least — and perhaps lichen and other tinier stuff, it kinda works.
So I decided to try another trick I stumbled upon for getting in-the-field quick stack of shots for focus stacking: video. Since this little toy has a video mode at the same resolution as the picture (HD video, 1920 max pixel length) I gave it a whirl with this old hitchhiker – a tick that followed me home one day (you can see it in the round clear disk I placed on the microscope toy). A ten-second video clip was then taken into a video editor to find about 8 usable frames which I stacked in the just now FREE Affinity Studio app (fantastic deal!) and ran it through and got this:
Another huge problem is that there’s no focus on this device. It’s fixed at this one zoom level. But hey, it was fun.
Enough of my fun though. Please share some of your McGyver and cheapy shot stories with the rest of us. It’s all part of this strange mix I pick up in the iNativerse between those who are after aeshetics, and those after IDs. But they don’t have to always be an either/or. And this is why I love shooting for iNat. It’s accommodating to both approaches and this makes it a terrific way for others to discover macro and other techniques at their own pace – and budget!
What do you think?