Well my first attempt did not go to well. To many moving parts to futz around with. The canon negative holder I got was unable to be mounted to the end of the bellows because it needed to be closer than that to achieve focus and fill the frame. However it was to fat to fit between the bellows arms so it kind of just didn't work!
I'm not completely off the idea, but I think to get everything lined up and flat you need something like the PB4 which unfortunately are commanding ridiculous prices on Ebay right now.
And for the record, the fotodiox macro bellows I bought is pretty much junk. It kind of works but everything is flimsy and the screws that move the bellows don't have any kind of locking system.
I'm getting the impression that there's confusion about how to set up those vintage slide duplicating units. The Canon unit mexipike acquired has a 55 mm ring with screw clamp for the accessory rim of an early series 50 mm FD lens [I forget if there was a 50 mm macro in the early FD lineup, but either 1.4 or 1.8 50mm FD lens with 55 mm filter threads could be used with the Bellows unit as is]; the circular fixture on the duplicating unit should mate with the support rail of the Canon Bellows, aand the combination of the support rail connection and lens accessory ring clamp pretty well insures proper alignment. With bellows on the camera body, the lens on the bellows and duplicating unit clamped to the lens, you're ready to adjust bellows extension, focus the lens, and set the extension of the bellows on the slide duplicator [the duplicating unit's bellows is for keeping extraneous light from affecting exposure and your results]. Back then, 1:1 duplication was the goal, with possibly a slightly larger than original size cropped image as an alternative.
The Opteka Duplicator and similar units generally consist of a single element close-up lens of appropriate strength mounted in a tube with slide-negative carrier at optimum distance at its outer end and lens accessory thread on the near end of a tube of the appropriate length for the camera's lens to find focus. The single element close-up lens requires stopping down the camera's lens way down for optimal results.
Some other comments come to mind:
[1] The photo of the OP's setup shows the negative/slide carrier at the light source, and a lot of open air between there and the camera lens. The old-time slide/neg copy set-ups were light-tight from subject [slide/neg] to camera. His results might be improved by following that principle.
[2] I know, the D800E is a terribly expensive basis for a slide/neg-to-digital-file converter, and I did a similar experiment with my now-departed Pentax K10D [traded in last year on a Nikon D7000]. Since I was copying a 24x36 mm original to a [roughly] 16x24 mm sensor, my setup had to give 2/3 life size images. I first got hold of a Pentax M42 bellows unit and Slide Duplicator that I used with a screw-mount 55mm f2 [SMCT] lens, but found I had to rack out the duplicator unit beyond its designed maximum to get all the slide in the frame; results of a slide copy were decent, but I didn't like having to manually stop down the system to meter and expose. I found a slide copying unit by Aetna with Series 6 threads, mounted it on a 35mm Pentax M lens with appropriate adapter ring and put a 21 mm automatic extension tube on the K10D [with 2+ mm from the 35 mm lens' focusing ring, I had my 2:3 magnification]. This setup gave me a properly sized image, but the duplicator unit's slide carrier had a light leak that affected the image quality. I put the project aside at that point, and wound up trading in the K10D before thinking of it again.
[3] When I came back to the slide/neg copy project just recently, I did some reading about the subject on line first, and then decided to get a refurbished Epson Perfection V500 flatbed scanner [$99 plus tax and shipping from the Epson online store]. After having scanned several rolls of color slides and negatives, I'm very happy. I scanned most of the slides/negs at 3200 dpi, but have found a few that warranted even higher resolution, and these 4800 dpi scans show some of the exquisite detail the 35 mm format can hold.
[4] To this point, I have only a couple of rolls of monochrome C-41 process negs I shot in the late 1990s, and haven't yet come across them for scanning, so I can't comment on the B/W issue.
Regards,
Vince
