I recently completed construction on my tabletop macro setup. (pictures to follow when I'm home) Essentially its built on a 12X24 thorlabs optical breadboard and uses a bunch of arca-swiss components (hejnar, sunwayfoto etc) The following is one of the first stacks I have done using flash (one canon 270ex II and one canon 320ex on ebay magic arm knockoffs connected to magnetic bases which are fixed to the breadboard) I am using a rigid SM2 tube construction with the Thorlabss ITL200 tube lens and a nikon 4x CFI BE plan objective. This picture was comprised of 96 exposures incremented with a newport linear stage with sm25 micrometer. Diffusion by ping pong ball. Background is a piece of green craft foam.
This is a straight output from ZS Pmax with sharpening and contrast adjustment. Nothing more. Critique welcome. I realize this is not the most stunning of images but I'm quite happy with the results. Obviously with a little retouching I can clean up the problem areas around the eyes and a few other defects I can see. I'm very much looking forward to collecting some more interesting specimens over the weekend.