Apologies if this is no longer of interest, but if it is you might find my macro site useful.

Good luck!

Guildford has a good LCE, but no other shops I'm aware of. The nearest at work is a small shop in Camberley but I can't see that lasting. Of course, you can go and play with cameras the local PC world etc but their staff are not especially photography centric. LCE is the best of the lot, hope they continue.

It's called posterisation, caused by post processing.

I'm hoping for a few clear skies over Christmas, it's been foggy and damp here, no great visibility =(

... as you can tell there are lots of options

Raynoxes are very good and you'll have so much fun using them. The thing about using a 50 is you'll need to get quite close, and dragonflies can be quite flighty.

There is not a shortage of great value for money, used, good enough quality manual macro lenses (ie vivitar 70-210 is easily available on ebay) that will let you shoot from a bit further away. It's actually quite hard to find a really bad macro lens

Maybe just play with the Raynox for now and do some homework in the meanwhile to look up shots you'd like to use and see what the eq is that's used for them. Flickr is quite helpful for that.

Be careful, this is how we all started

Wow, superb package! If you don't get a sale ping me a mail about #5&6? (I have rest)

Thank you

Hello,

If you have a telecentric lens then this doesn't happen, but not many of us do. Good software will handle the change in size, have a look at zerene stacker. I wouldn't recommend moving bellows extension length during a stack but move (camera + bellows + lens) all on a stage. What you don't want to do though is move the specimen relative to the light because that changes the light during the shoot which isn't great.

Lastly, I have a huge site about all this - http://extreme-macro.co.uk/ - it is zerene stacker stacking with stackshot. Different tools but similar process to how you describe it.

Had a go at this last night but it didn't perform too well, trails showing on a 2:30 exposure (max was 5:00). Not too surprising and it was all a bit of a hurry as I didn't get started till late because of a parent's evening. I read somewhere the trail-less keeper rate was around 40%. Does make me consider a faster wide angle lens though

John I'll take the SMC Pentax-A 35-80mm f/4-5.6 please - can you plz ping me your email with shipping cost when you have it so I can paypal you?

Thx!

Good tip Matt, does a great job, I just tried it. Thanks