Nice bellows. This is the version that has a "quick" adjust to approximate magnification, then a "fine screw" adjust on the front. The knob is knurled, and each knurling step is 10um movement. Nice bellows for stacking with reasonably consistent step sizes. The one you have appears to be M42 on both...

I'm very fond of the Nikon 5x MM objective for its long working distance, perfectly flat field, and telecentricity. I also have good results with the Nikon M Plan 5. The 5x Mitutoyo is of course hard to beat for central sharpness. There are so many options at 5x! Even the lowly Nikon M5 does a super...

I would suggest using a reversed enlarger lens for getting higher mags on your 200mm. A 50mm f2.8 El-Nikkor will give you 4:1 when the 200mm is focused at infinity. A 100mm (or 105mm) will give you ~2:1. This is an easy way of getting these magnifications with good IQ.

The adapter I use has up to 8-deg of tilt, which is enough for the lighting application I use it for. I generally go with around 5-deg complementary tilting on both camera and subject. Tilting in the vertical rather than horizontal helps maintain the image circle. If you use a T/S bellows, this usua...

I use tilt/shift occasionally with my coin photography, both with and without stacking. Tilting the coin allows direct reflection without resorting to axial lighting (I call it "pseudo-axial") but causes DOF and elliptical distortion issues. Tilt/shift helps fix this, though I have never had good lu...

I published this over on the Coin Community Coin Photography Forum, and thought it might be of interest here.... Downsizing an image 50% eliminates most of the camera sensor demosaicing aberrations, but results in half the effective magnification. 100% crops of the original image show demosaicing/in...

You can also get a used Canon XS, 10MP, Live View, EFSC, for ~$125. The EFSC is very useful for macro, especially at mag>1. Add a Nikon 55mm Micro Nikkor and an EOS-Nikon adapter and you have a great little flower rig.

Ray, the focus mechanism is the same as the 1 st Optiphot series, but as I recall, it was a 100 micron revolution, not 200 like the Labophot 1. I could be wrong about that, it's been 25 years on these. Can you pm me about the biophot base? No, you are correct. I made a typo. The Optiphot does indee...

Thanks guys for the info. Is the Optiphot M the same as an Optiphot 1 in terms of the fine focus mechanism (3mm shaft) or Optiphot 2 (4mm shaft)?

The Biophot seems like a beautiful instrument, but I have no interest in building up a working Biophot. If someone else has interest, let me know.

Just got back from the De Anza Electronics swap, and picked up a couple of Nikon microscope bases. One of them is marked Optiphot, so I assume this is an Optiphot-1. It has a 200um per turn fine focus knob. The other has no model name but is a much more sophisticated base with aperture control and p...

Looks great. Maybe worth a try!

edited to add: when will you do some checks to see how well the high res mode works at higher magnification? That's where the Pentax K3-ii fell apart for me.

OK, I did a check of this lens reversed at 5x. I saw the same issue with focal length changing as I did at 1x, manifesting as a change in focal plane from f2.2-f4. By f4 the focus was fairly stable. The images are of the Lincoln Cent "money shot", a 5x image of the Date and MintMark. At f2.2 and f2....

Ray, have you used the lens reversed or straight mounted? Mine arrived today, btw it is not Xenon as it was pictured, but a Xenon-E too, weird, but I'm not complaining :P The lens is in near mint condition. Gotta find a way to mount it reversed and I'll try it at 2-3X - 4-5X. It was normally mounte...

I like the imaging technique to ensure infinity focus on the aperture iris. Makes me want to try it out. I took a shot at making a telecentric combo a while back but never got it quite right. Maybe I can use this technique to make it happen...

Now the question is...what are the results?

Those long focal length process lenses were designed for mag ratios around 1:1, so are probably not going to work well as a tube lens for infinity-corrected objectives.

Edited to add: the extension required even for infinity focus is also fairly prohibitive.