As a long-time photographer and gearhead, I’ve amassed an odd assortment of photography lenses, adapters, and other goodies over the years.  I put this stuff to work recently while tinkering around with macro photography.  There are a few common ways to do macro photography: use a macro lens, use diopter lenses, reverse-mount a lens, add extension via tubes or bellows, mount 2 lenses face-to-face, or any combination of these.

I combined a few components in a configuration for my Panasonic GH4 Micro Four Thirds (MFT) camera and some Nikon lenses.

An adapter added to the camera enabled the use of Nikon F-mount lenses.  Added to this was an extension tube, then a Nikkor 105mm Micro lens, and finally a reverse-mounted Nikkor 50mm lens.  The lenses were mounted face-to-face using a coupling ring, a cheap male/male threaded ring that screws into the filter threads on the lenses facing each other.

A subject 0.5 cm in size will fill the width of the image using this configuration so I sometimes back off the magnification to something a bit more manageable depending on the subject.  Depth of focus becomes an issue at higher magnifications so focus stacking becomes a useful technique if the subject allows it.