Taking a shot of something of the size of a dragon flies head with microscope gear needs some odd and often expensive equipment Brian. One of the problems is the magnification of the objectives. Run of the mill microscope objectives don't go below 4x. That roughly means that a 4mm object will fill the view. The F ratio of these is about F5. The faster the F ratio the higher the resolution so in real terms a macro lens would be a more sensible thing to use. Go to a 10x objective, 1.6mm view and the F ratio rockets up to F2. Then comes the types of objective. Ideally they need to be plan apo's or better still plan apo Nikon CF's as more things can be done with them such as putting the infinite tube types on the end of a 200mm telephoto lens which can also give a larger view within limits.

Apart from Nikon CF's microscope objective produce chromatic aberration which is corrected in the eyepiece so the simplest way to do it is to focus a compact camera etc to infinity and take the shot through the eyepiece of the microscope. People tend to favour older compact cameras - some of the Nikon Coolpix for instance. Nikon also made a type of eyepiece that screws into a swing lens Coolpix. Photographic eyepieces are also available from the major manufactures - Nikon, Olympus, Leitz/Leica, and Olympus. Prices are such from these that the vast majority of people use 2nd hand gear that is often also fairly old.

There are plenty of examples of what more affordable gear can do on youtube such as this one which shows the type of microscope that is ideally needed - trinocular head = has the vertical tube the camera sits on and 2 others with eyepieces to look through. It's also possible to do the same thing with a binocular head = no vertical tube but mounting a camera is a lot more difficult.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoNQWg6T81M

Also looking on ebay there are now a lot of low magnification objectives available even 1x at low prices. I have no idea how good or not these are.

Really for all but tiny things suitable for microscopes David has the ideal gear the high mag Canon macro lens and the ordinary one. This site has lots of examples and information about all of the methods people use but often tends to be at the expensive end of things. The problem is that to get the sort of results they do pretty decent gear is needed.

http://www.photomacrography.net/

These pages have some useful information and he is very capable. Pity his album isn't up. There is a presentation on there which may be of interest. Home made gear isn't unusual in this field as some can't be bought.

http://www.micromagus.net/index1.html

I should add that camera pixel counts and microscopes are a bit odd. It is possible to justify something like a 5D MkIII but the ability to afford a certain Olympus objective and the microscope it fits on that would need it is rather questionable. It's a low magnification one with a rather fast aperture. I'd guess other manufacturers might also make something similar now but given the cost maybe not.

John
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