Macro Photography

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.

And yes, count on there being more on this microscope/DSLR setup in the next few months.

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

First problem was finding a chip to use as my first subject that you can actually see the die, with most chips being fully encapsulated in some form of plastic or ceramic.

My choices for this are more than a little limited, with the realistic choices being limited to an old UV erasable EPROM or some form 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.

Extracting the CCD from the board was minor, however getting the addon optics that were glued to the chip off, turned out to be more interesting, and ended up needing brute force

And yes, this will be a multipart series of macro shots, as fairly recently I have upgraded my DSLR to something with way higher resolution, and from a junked camera I have a better CCD sensor. Watch this space for updates.