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My first macro photo, taken through double glass, is not yet perfect, so I still need a lot of practice.

Focus stack from 15 RAW files

Trying out some extension tubes for my Canon camera about a week ago when this fella showed up. Now, male carpenter bees are not able to sting, even though they will make aggressive passes at you. Think it came out okay for an overcast day.

It turns into a macro lens. Nikon D5300, AF-S DX NIKKOR 18-105mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR, Raw format, 67 mm lens reversal ring for £10.99. Not bad. A normal macro lens could cost more than £300.

I love spring time! (Except for the snakes, spiders, etc that "come alive" all over) Lots of great subjects for closeup and macro photography. Got a few shots of a bee gathering pollen from a thistle.The images probably need more work, but just got a new camera that won't require (I hope) as much sharpening to get a decent image.

I love hiking through the great southwest and taking many thousands of snaps, mostly of landscapes because my damn DSLR lens won't focus on small stuff. I recently threw my worn-out camera away and replaced it with a "toy" iPhone XR camera and three Moment lenses. Now I can take home some high resolution photos of small (even tiny) things that don't move while I'm shooting at them. That's better than nothing, and I don't have to carry around several thousand dollars worth of heavy photography equipment. If there is any interest I will describe in detail how I use CameraPixels on my iPhone XR to focus bracket up to 50 images and Affinity Photo to focus align and merge the images. There is a wonderful world of macro photography right at our fingertips, and it doesn't have to cost thousands of dollars. This first image below, about one cm across and one cm deep, was taken with a Moment macro lens attached to an iPhone XR mounted on a tripod. CameraPixels was used to focus bracket 40 images, and Affinity Photo was used to focus align and merge the images as well as remove a halo around the petals. The third image shows the sexual part of a bright red geranium flower taken with the iPhone XR and Moment macro lens. Moment claims a 10X magnification from this lens, and I've verified that with a ruler. Imagine looking at a three to five inch cluster of bright red geranium flowers and staring into a single flower that is about 3-5 cm wide. What you see in this third image is the reproductive part of one of those flowers; the image is about 2 cm wide. Look closely at the detail in this image. See the tiny piece of fiber stuck to the pollen on one of the stamens? The middle image was clipped out of the right image in Affinity Photo and expanded using Bicubic Interpolation. We can clearly see the individual pollen particles. This is over a 50X magnification!