Ooook, here's a bit of "cptrios has a new macro bellows and too much time on his hands...but he doesn't actually have that much time on his hands, so he should probably be spending it on something else" action!
Earlier this year I used Copex Rapid to test out a couple of lenses on a local hill. I included some scans from one frame a few pages back, I think. Now that I have more scanning options at my fingertips, I figured it might be interesting to see just how much could be squeezed out of it.
This was originally shot with a Rikenon P 50mm f/1.4 (definitely the best manual focus 50/1.4 I've ever used, though I've never had a Zeiss C/Y) on a Pentax ME Super, and I thiiink this frame was at f/4. Though it could have been f/2.8.
First, the full shot:
And a crop from the 1x scan, using a Micro-Nikkor AF 55/2.8 (originally 42mp, 7952x5304). Pretty impressive detail already, I think; if you apply a smidge of USM to it, it doesn't look all that different from a digital shot from the same camera.
Same setup but with the M2 extension ring. I'm not exactly sure what the magnification is, but 4 stitched shots result in a 12739x8539 file, so let's call it 1.6x. Definitely getting a bit more detail in the white flag on the side of the truck, as well as the text. Not a huge jump, but not nothing either.
Now, with the new addition to the setup: a reversed Rodagon 50/2.8 on a Pentax m42 auto-bellows. Things are getting dicey here with plane alignment, etc, and this is pretty heavily stretching the bounds of practicality. It requires 9 stitched shots to cover the whole frame, and all of the variables in the platform-light-panel-film-holder-copy-stand-bellows-camera chain need to be perfect to make it work. Final file size was almost exactly 20,000x13,400px, so 2.5xish. 268mp! Again, not an overwhelming amount of new detail on the truck, but certainly more than on the previous magnification:
However, things get more interesting with the fence a bit to the right:
Finally, from the "ridiculous" category, I decided to have a bit of fun and use a 4x microscope optic. This is
completely impractical, and it was a royal pain to even get the thing in focus with its insanely thin DoF. I'll put the previous crop and the new one side by side here so you can flip back and forth:
Did we get anything more out of it? Maybe? A tiny bit? Let's look at the fence:
A bit more! Also worth noting that even that 4x shot, if the microscope lens had better "sharpness coverage," would be a totally passable 8x12 print despite being a 15% crop of the original frame. Cool!