advice on higher magnification add-on lenses

[piggsy]

Hi,

I'm just wondering if anyone could give me advice on what might be a good path forward for significant (3-6x) kinds of macro for me.

I am doing pretty good with my current setup - I use a Tamron 180mm F3.5 (adapted from nikon) macro for daylight shooting, and an Olympus 60mm 2.8 for night time photos of live bugs in my yard (sometimes with the Raynox 250 / 150 or both stacked on it). I don't feel like my camera (Olympus E-M1ii) is a big limitation for what I'm doing, so far.

So with the current setup I can put out stuff like this:

bicolour wasp high magnification by PIG, on Flickr

wasp on tall Baeckea by PIG, on Flickr

(both of these, the subject is resting on a thing about 2-3mm across)

painted lady roosting on olive leaf by PIG, on Flickr

with the Olympus 60/2.8 and Raynoxes.

I shoot only stuff live and handheld, where I find it. Sometimes I'll snip off the twig or whatever the bug is resting on, and put it on this handy thing I got with a background or cut flower from my yard behind it.

This tops out at around 2.24x magnification (60mm focus breathes down to 48.5mm @ 1x + 12.8 diopters) on my 2x crop camera, which is more about the limit of my patience for compositing and stacking the images that come out of it.

What I'm looking to do with new gear, mainly, would be something like an image of this:

blue triangle butterfly closeup by PIG, on Flickr

where I could make the entire focus of the image one compound eye. This is just a 2 image stack at F10 and under 1x magnification, but, you get the idea - something where around 5-3mm would be the entire field of view would be good.

I'd *really* like to be able to use the inbuilt Olympus focus bracketing/stacking feature on the camera. Working distance wise, the working distance is already pretty close at about ~11mm from the end of the CPL filter with my DCR150/250 stack configuration.

Resolution/working distance wise, am I better off with:

Auto-extension tube behind the 60mm, keep the Raynox 150/250 stack
Buy a Raynox MSN-202/505
Get a 'proper' microscope objective or a reversed high resolution lens and stick that on the front of the Olympus 60mm.

or

Do something else entirely?

Is anyone else doing run-and-gun high magnification stacked macro of live subjects? What are you using?

[Macro_Cosmos]

You need to resize those images. They are too big even for my 2k monitor, and most use 720p or 1080p still. Make the width 1600 pixels. Nice photos by the way.

As for your question, the Laowa 2.5-5x would be good, just DIY a translation stage, I have a tutorial on that if you're interested, it's pretty cheap, use that with a light small tripod. Improved lighting and diffusion can rectify the light issues which I assume is what you are using the polariser for. The Laowa 2.5-5x does not work well with a polariser.

If you *must* have the focus bracketing feature, lens stacking sounds like a good method. I don't have experience in that, so I'll leave it to the experts.