Ok, I got this idea from another forum I subscribe to.

The coin you're looking at is an old Dutch "rijksdaalder". It's about 2.9cm (1.14") diameter. The red square is what you see enlarged in the main picture.

How did I do this? I took my Nikon 70-300mm and a fixed 50mm lens. Taped the 2 together with the fronts of the lenses facing eachother. The 50mm is an old non AF lens with manual apeture control so I could open it up completely. Set the 50mm to focus on infinite. Then focused with the zoom lens which was pretty iffy since the DOF is VERY small, around 1mm (0.04"). The 300 zoom was attached to the D70.

My setup wasn't completely shakefree, but I got a decent enough image for a test :) Shot on 1600ISO setting on my D70 cause the combination taked alot of light and since I had my hands on the contraption to keep it in focus I had to shoot fast.

Anyhow, just wanted to share :P

That really came out well. Sounds like a neat trick too!

Thats awesome. Like a microscope camera. Very very cool

used a bit better setup:
Now I can barely see the nick in the middle of the E, the rest of the scratches are near invisible to the naked eye :)

Thats just scary... Have you tried doing this to someones hand or a bug? Or... I dunno, everything? Maybe a computer chip? One of these days i'll get the guts to try it :|

I have to find a bug first :) Not that many insects around yet over here.. I was looking round for a wasp or a fly though, settled for the coin again :)

The 50mm lens will be about 20 dioptre, so it's effectively a pretty extreme close-up lens. A SLR wide-angle would give an even bigger image, but the retrofocal design ( to keep the rear element clear of the mirror) would help give some working room. There were reversing rings made, which let you mount a lens back to front, which was supposed to give a better macro image -- the lens optical design would expect the film to be closer than the object. I don't recall ever hearing of an adaptor to do what you did. It might be possible to do something with a pair of Cokin adaptors, for something a bit more solid.

The images I posted were with the 70-300zoom zet to max zoom (i.e. 300mm which amounts to 450 because of the crop factor of the digicam). It is possible to to zoom less, but I wanted to see how extreme I could go. hmm I've got a 200mm telelens here grin

The second one is mind boggling... great quality in that one too.... wow....

i second michelle's wow! WOW! o.O!

I think that I was able to resolve to about 3-4mm when I did something similar to that (200mm lens on AE-1 with a 28mm lens held backwards in front of that lens). Great job! The sharpness is pretty good and I'm sure you could even improve on that once the technique is perfected.

I mentioned the Cokin filter system. It's a system of square filters, with holders and adaptor rings which really opened up the filter business in the early eighties. The adaptors are flat disks, with a hole and filter thread to fit the lens, and the outer diameter set by the holder. There were two sizes, 'A' and 'P'. Now, I've not tried this, but you can get plastic edging strip, a U-section, from various sources, and with the right sise it should be possible to fit two Cokin adaptors face-to-face, which would let you fix the two lenses together. Would it be strong enough? I'm not sure. Anyway, the Cokin system had conventional close-up lenses.