Diffusers on the lamps don't do much good; they will take up only a small proportion of the "sky" as seen by the subject. You need diffusers close to the subject, so the whole "sky" looks evenly lit from the subject's point of view. .

These are really stunning. Well lit and great use of deep stacking!!

Yawns, those are little works of art. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and I will imitate those for sure.

That's an interesting observation. It may explain why Nikon couldn't just use the Printing Nikkor directly for this task.

For those of us who use Nikon lenses on non-Nikon bodies, these results without the automatic correction are the relevant ones and are extremely useful!!!!

Wonderful test! It is very rare to see such a nicely standardized set testing LoCA over such a wide range of lenses. Looks like there was a mislabeling in the Voigtlander vs 150 Sigma though; the panels say "105 Sigma". The Macro-Varon is amazingly clean. The Scanner Nikkor is even more amazing sinc...

I'll do that Robert. I have some other really interesting lenses waiting for me there which might be gems, and which I suspect few or none of us have ever seen before. I go back to the US on Oct 10 to visit my family and will pick up this load then. I will be close to the baggage weight limit when I...

Wow, what detail! I had often seen butterfly eggs with those little rings around their tops, but I never realized that the ring was actually made up of little "fence posts".

What always amazes me about your stacks is that the lighting looks "normal", that object could be as big as a lobster. You don't have the usual lighting artifacts that give the game away...

Do the exposures change when you close it down?

Returning to the topic of p2 and 3 of this thread, I just found a cheap Soviet wafer-lithography lens on eBay, whose seller probably knows nothing about it. The description says "Presented lens used for special shootings at criminal policy and for special machines which used in hard rocks (gabbro-di...

One important general trait of insects (except Ephemeroptera I think) is that once they molt into their winged form, they never molt again. This general principle tells us that no, the antennae of this adult leafhopper cannot grow back if broken. None of the adult parts that are molded into the exos...

If I were you I'd test it at a couple of apertures, starting at wide open; single shots or short stacks would be sufficient. As I said, sometimes contrast does improve a bit on stopping down, but watch for degradation of sharpness, or vignetting. Also check if the aperture is really doing anything a...

Yes, that's a very bad choice for multiple reasons. Tube lenses generally shouldn't be stopped down at all, as Rik explained in many posts here. Sometimes stopping down just a bit does help improve contrast though. Maybe that is why you did it?

Are you really shooting at f/11 as the last picture of the lens suggests?