I like that - took me a while to see the spider. Super picture.

Those are very good.

Presumably these aren't cropped, then, or you would have left the legs in! Just reduce the number of tubes to lower the magnification. You will still be able to crop if you need to without any loss of detail.

As for catch in focus with the tubes you might need to check the mounting plate of the tube to make sure it's connecting properly. I have a set of Vivitar tubes which were coated in a nice coat of matt black paint. Neither the stop down metering or the catch in focus worked until I cleaned the paint away from the contact point. It's a common problem and the most likely cause if catch in focus works o.k. with the lens on it's own. I have a Pentax branded 50mm tube with a nice shiny plate which worked fine immediately.

I use a 50mm tube with a M 50mm f1.7. Trying to decide whether to get a 'proper' macro lens, but this cheap combination is actually pretty good. Have to get quite close up and personal, though!

That's actually pretty good for a first attempt with a 50mm and tubes - certainly better than my first few goes. It's a little bit noisy - I tend to limit the camera to ISO 200 for macro and it could be a little sharper (macros respond quite well to minor sharpening in post processing), but colour, depth of field and lighting are all good.

Spiders are very hard - I've put one of my recent attempts in the gallery today, but I'm still not totally happy with it.

Which 50mm are you using, how long a tube and which camera?

If you have it, and assuming you are using manual focus, you might find it easier with catch in focus if hand held. I'm actually getting better results with that at the moment than with the tripod because of the difficulties in getting the tripod properly positioned. Even when I do the insect is usually long gone

You aren't ever going to fill the frame at 1:1 so some cropping is inevitable if you want a larger image. Given the camera and lens you have that isn't ever likely to lead to much, if any, image degradation unless you magnify like crazy.

Your teleconverter is obviously very good, but I'd still expect a 1:1 image with the lens alone to be better cropped and magnified than a larger image achieved by using the lens and converter. Just experiment a little. If I'm wrong then great!

The most recent picture in my portfolio is a 100% magnification from my £30 setup and very little, if any, detail is lost from the original. Your setup is way better than that so you should have no problem. The previous photo on my portfolio of the ladybird is an original 1:1 shot and will take magnification of several times before losing detail and clarity. Both are better if you click on them to view 'large'

You can easily limit the ISO so whatever setting you use it won't go over your maximum. I rarely use anything over 200 to give me as much detail as possible, though I suspect anything up to 500 or so would be fine.

I've never used AF for macro as I don't have any suitable AF lenses. I'd be concerned that it might scare the insects away (definitely with a K-r!) and the DOF is so small I suspect the camera would have difficulty judging focus anyway. That might be why yours locked up - just got too confused.

I have used liveview with some success, but prefer the viewfinder where possible. I pretty much use catch in focus all the time for macro now, unless I'm using the tripod. It's so accurate with my K-r. Framing isn't really an issue as I crop pretty much everything to frame the insect anyway.

Good luck. Judging by the 3rd ladybird picture you are going to be getting some pretty impressive results.

I think Amazon at £46.91 are cheapest unless you have some Clubcard vouchers to swap for Jessops ones - £5 of clubcard vouchers are worth £10 at Jessops.

Yes - looking at it again immediately after posting I thought it didn't bounce either, but it does. Must just be the flash insert itself that moves, not the whole head.

Hi Jacqui

I've been considering this one

http://www.jessops.com/online.store/products/79002/show.html

Reviews seem o.k. It might not be up there with the £200 flashes, but seems to be a good step up from the built in flash. Looks to have ttl metering and full automatic control and is under £50. I just want something I can use with an extension off-camera for macro.

You can do a little better than the Jessops price (Amazon, for example, are a few pounds less), but I have some spare Tesco Clubcard vouchers which makes it just under £25

3rd for me as well - it's a very good shot indeed. Nicely in focus and good depth of field.

The first is just a little out of focus at the critical bits and the second shows far too much noise because of the high ISO. Are you leaving the camera on auto? Can't understand why it would suddenly have selected ISO 5000 otherwise. You would be better off leaving it in AV mode and keeping the aperture at f13 or smaller. You can see the results of the smaller aperture in the last picture. At least limit the ISO to 400 or so to prevent this happening again.

Why do you feel the need to use the converter? Whilst the results, especially in the 3rd photo, are excellent, you have a fantastic macro lens I can only dream of getting. The working distance with this on it's own should be fine without the converter and any additional glass in the way is bound to have an impact on image quality and reduce the light available.

Try some of these again without the converter, limiting the ISO and using a smaller aperture. Good as the 3rd one is, I think you will see a difference.

Are these hand held? Manual or auto focus? Might be worth trying 'catch in focus' if you are using manual focus. I usually have a better success rate with this. I've not got a set-up that allows auto focus, but that wouldn't be the choice anyway for most macro photographers.

Addictive this macro, isn't it

Was worth about £2 last time I was in Belgium, but that was 1979.......

Worth nothing now I guess, but you'll need 30 X 2p to get a first class stamp soon so no great loss.