While looking for bees to photograph, I came upon this little spider.
I had my make-shift macro lens with me so I stopped to capture these pictures.

Tip: click top image to zoom in more

This image shows my current macro setup. I'm shooting with a crop(DX) sensor Nikon D300S. This has been my workhorse camera for years prior to upgrading to the NIKON D850. I will continue to use this camera for my macro shots due to the extra magnification I get from using the crop sensor.

The lens I'm using for this (Nikon AF‑S DX Zoom‑Nikkor 55‑200mm f/4‑5.6G ED) was basically a throw-away lens. I'd carelessly placed an iced tea in my bag which had a crease in the can, causing it to leak in my shoulder bag while I was taking photos. The lens was dried off in the sun, but the electronics were fried and the lens would no longer auto focus. In this photo you can see that the lens is actually reversed with the extension tubes on the front of the lens, closest to the camera. The extention tubes attach to the reverser which attaches to the camera. On the other end of the lens, you can see that I have attached an aperture lock that allows me to manually adjust my aperture. In front of that, I have a simple UV filter to keep dust out of the lens assembly.

Instead of using the normal lens focus ring to take pictures, the zoom ring is used to adjust the focal length until the subject is in focus. Slight body movement towards and away from the subject allows for the fine tuning of the focus once you get the subject in frame and at the size you want.

My flash was too bright at first, so I threw on a home-made paper diffuser.

Camera: Nikon D300S
Macro Lens as described above

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