Toft Garden Wildlife

While pruning the conifer hedge, I found this old Goldcrest nest - a beautiful small cup completely lined with feathers and one very small (old) egg. The other images show what flowers are out at the moment, a couple of birds already setting up territories and the only insect (other than honey bees) active (Scathophaga stercoraria)

Photographing a Leaf Insect Egg with Coupled Lenses for Extreme Macro

Having used the setup with a single reversed lens (image of set up at end of this post), I decided to try the two-connected-lens technique for extreme macro.The set up included glueing two filter rings together with the screws to the outside to allow two lenses to be connected lens to lens. I used the Olympus 50mm with aperture set to 1.8 and a 10-24mm Fuji lens. The Fuji needed to be used at 24mm zoom length to give sufficient circle of view. It was mounted onto a focusing rail over a lightbox. The egg is only about 2mm and the focusing distance less than 1cm so an LCD light was needed to get light onto the subject. Also photographed an Eyed Moth wing - shows the individual scales in detail (first image). The second moth wing and the White butterfly wing were photographed with the single reversed Olympus 50mm lens.