Today I basically coupled various micro 4/3 lenses face-to-face onto my Panasonic Lumix G95; although I don’t currently have sample photos from the setups, I was able to get magnifications of up to about 5X. The lens that worked quite well for me as the main lens (the lens that was attached directly to the camera) was the Rokinon 50mm F/1.2 lens; I used the Viltrox 23mm lens in reverse again, but this time I tried it in front of the Rokinon. This set up created vignette at every aperture; the aperture was adjusted for the Viltrox but not for the Rokinon telephoto lens, because adjusting the Rokinon would not change the level of sharpness of the resulting image. Instead, the Rokinon’s aperture would in such configuration simply be a way to increase and decrease brightness of how much light would be entering through it.
For the Viltrox, I tried apertures of F/5.6 & F/8, but also F/16; honestly, I didn’t see a discernable difference in the amount of vignette between any of these apertures. Not only that, but the vignetting was rather minor; the left & right edges of the midframe were free of vignette. Virtually, the only vignette was near the corners of the frame. I tried zooming in on the frame for analysis of sharpness at the center using the Viltrox/Rokinon configuration; this was overall an excellent result. The midframes were not as sharp though, and I could tell that overall, at all of the given apertures that were examined, chromatic abberation was a slightly evident. The corners aren’t quite as important for sharpness as the midframe and center, mainly because the extremely shallow depth of field would require virtually any scene to be focus stacked, which would result in the requirement to crop out a somewhat significant amount of the midframe.
I had a discussion on Facebook and Dpreview about using a reverse lens technique ; mainly, how such technique may compare with a much more expensive macro setup (the Mitutoyo 5X). What I gained learning from the discussion was that it is possible to get better results with the Mitutoyo objective lens (which costs over one thousand dollars new). However, if you’re someone who may be wondering if the Mitutoyo objective is a necessary must, then I’d suggest to consider what camera you may like to use for macro photography in the 5X range; specifically, try figuring out the pixel density of your camera; the higher the pixel density is, the sharper a lens needs to be to be able to resolve perfectly at such extreme magnification. Pixel density is a relationship, mainly between sensor size and resolution. A Micro 4/3 camera is generally a great type of camera for macro photography mainly because it is easier to achieve a given amount of magnification than it is with a larger size of sensor. That being said though, the smaller the sensor of any camera is, the more likely it is that the pixel density is higher; for example, twenty megapixels of resolution in a micro 4/3 camera in comparison with twenty megapixels in a full frame camera results in the pixels being more crammed into a given space in the micro 4/3 sensor because it is the smaller sensor.
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