Macro Photography

A collection of my extreme closeup photos taken through my microscope.
Updated: October 24, 2024

First, the question, What is macro photography?

Put simply, it is taking extreme close-up shots, usually of very small objects. Most people use a macro lens with a camera, but in my case, I never do anything the easy way, so I took the microscope I usually use for some surface mount electronics work and ordered an adapter to allow me to use it with my DSLR.

As for subjects for these shots, and given my background in the electronics business, taking photographs of parts of chips is the obvious choice.

Initially, I encountered difficulty locating a chip suitable for visual examination of the die, given that plastic or ceramic encapsulation completely covers most chips, and the nasty chemicals needed to remove the encapsulation are not something I want to get involved in.

My options for this are quite limited. The practical choices are either an old UV erasable EPROM or some type of Charge Coupled Device (CCD) sensor. As it happened, I had just scrapped an ancient Sony camcorder and still had the boards in the junk bin. Removing the CCD from the board was easy, but detaching the glued-on additional optics required more effort and brute force.

Galleries
CCD Macro Sony CCD. This was the first attempt at this type of photography, using a Sony CCD from the junk bin as the subject. In the future the plan is to do some more shots, and this time using a different and larger CCD from a 4K security camera. [view]
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