Quote Originally Posted by inCore View Post
Metric, I really like what you did there. I've tried reversing my Nikkor 35mm f/1.8G (making sure that it's wide open with the use of a piece of cardboard in the mechanism) and having my Nikkor 55-200mm at various ranges, mostly at 200mm. I can't get a sharp picture like you did though, I assume it's my lenses. I've seen many people do it with a 50mm and a 100mm, people such as Brian Peterson, but also others on the internet. Do you reckon it's the combination of a 50mm and a 100mm that does it? Is the 50mm necessary? A 50mm lens certainly seems to be popular, I've seen it being done with a 70-300mm and a 50mm with good results too.
Getting a sharp image with stacked lenses is very difficult since you're losing light with the added glass and distance to the sensor, plus in your case with your 35mm + 200mm, you're hitting a magnification of 6.7 or so ([35 + 200] / 35) and with that a very, very shallow depth-of-field.

The 50mm primes seem very popular choice since 1.) Their price of <$100 and 2.) shown below, a decent magnification level. As for lens choices, so far for me, it's a tossup on whether the lens matters. The kit 18-55 lens has given me decent results - it still can't compare to a dedicated macro or the 50mm f/2 in terms of sharpness, but I found the quality satisfactory.

Here's a visual I threw together this afternoon to get an idea of how much stacking lenses with increase the magnification. All of these are not cropped, the only post-processing done was black and white conversion, contrast boost and some sharpening. As a mentioned earlier, a lot of light is lost, so for these I used 2 100w light sources and only barely managed a 1/4" of a shutter speed on the last shot (70-200 + 18mm).

Enjoy