Yusuf, welcome to the forum!

I don't see an attached image.

--Chris S.

. . . there are very mixed reviews when it comes to its use as a macro lens - which I think is mostly due to its behaviour when used with the aperture wide open at 4.0. While it's quite sharp at 4.0, that's not the 'taking aperture' that Rodenstock had in mind. They designed the lens to be used at ...

Alan Smith wrote: ↑

Fri Nov 03, 2023 6:42 am

I bought this Nikon SMZ-2 on Ebat for £49 delivered.

Well done! If I find such a beast, I'll hit "buy" in an instant.

--Chris S.

Ksparks519, welcome aboard! :D I don't disagree with anything Mark said. Older macro lenses tend to be both good in quality and friendly on the budget. In my experience, close-up work is easier, and quality is better, with a dedicated macro lens that has a longish focal length. The 50mm macro lenses...

Guessing, here--maybe C-Ring Reticle Retainer?

--Chris S.

Helium2, welcome to posting! :D I don't know your specific subject interests for macro and close-up photography. But let me suggest that you strongly consider buying a dedicated, long-focal-length, standard "macro" lens. (I put the word "macro" in quotation marks because this use of this word has ma...

Regarding Robert's demonstration of his Makro-Symmar 180: Agreed, the lens looks remarkably sharp. But that's not all that's sharp. --crop.jpg A hand-held 180mm lens, at 1:1 magnification, at 1/80 of a second--and this sharp? Wish I could still do this, but not since my twenties. Meanwhile, I'll car...

. . . people swear by the Nikon AF Micro-NIKKOR 200mm f/4D IF-ED, as the best lens ever? The copy I tested had pretty severe CAs (CAs and LoCAs) even at f/8 at 1x. Funny. My specimen of that lens was fuzzy at macro ranges, and a disaster at infinity. After I remarked on this in the forum, a member ...

. . . the performance gap between the PN105A, the best ever, and a consumer market macro lenses is narrowing to the point its pretty shocking how close high-end macro lenses have come in a few years. Just a decade ago the PN held a significant lead in strict CA correction and center to corner consi...

I sent the piece to a friend who studies spiders at a university. Will quote a portion of his response here: "The study referenced basically proves the theory of how spider legs were thought to move—nobody had explicitly tested it." Cool! I wonder if there is a photographic application, here. I've b...

Robert, thanks for speaking up about this particular lens specimen. While I agree with all of Lou's points, I did notice in the listing that this exact lens specimen had been tested by you. If I were a potential buyer (am definitely not, since I have a very good, tested specimen of the better A vers...

Looks like a nice item for the right person. If I understand this piece, it's a compact equivalent of an x/y stage, a rotation stage, and a goniometer pair, already integrated in a stack. My own subject stage is home-made collection parts to accomplish the same thing, at greater cost and with the ne...

Nice stuff!

Lucky you, Alan. In my studio, it's cast off optical/mechanical parts--potentially useful in future macro rigs--that breed. To the unenlightened, it looks an awful lot like junk.

--Chris S.

Perhaps macabre, but interesting, use of dead spiders as "necrobotic" grippers in a robotics research lab. Relies on spiders' not having antagonistic muscle pairs, but "flexor muscles to curl their legs inward toward their body and hydraulic pressure to extend their legs outward." The researchers in...

Steve, thanks for your summary. It's making me re-think some unexpected behavior I've experienced in the past with small, low-mass items.

--Chris S.