This morning was maintenance and an "arts and crafts" day. I cleaned the camera sensor with a wet-mop kit, inspected it with an illuminated sensor magnifying tool to assure that it was clean and free of streaks.

Did a quick hippity-hop to the Hobby Lobby and picked up several sheets of "Beetle Black Crushed Velvet Scrapbook Paper" (SKU 982348) that I use to flock my lenses and adapters. I also use black velvet sheets that are adhesive-backed that I get there as well. The Beetle Black Crushed Velvet is a goto material that is used by others here as well as those on other macro-micro forums.

I rolled a piece of the Beetle Black (black side in) to make a lens hood to eliminate any fugitive light that might affect the quality of the image. Stray light will result in softness and haze so it is best to eliminate it.

Of course, I had to try it all out so I mounted the 28mm enlarger lens with its DIY hood onto the Vivitar 2X macro focus teleconverter and attached it to the fully extended bellows and staged this preserved green bottle fly for a focus stacking session of its compound eye.

This morning was maintenance and an "arts and crafts" day. I cleaned the camera sensor with a wet-mop kit, inspected it with an illuminated sensor magnifying tool to assure that it was clean and free of streaks.

Did a quick hippity-hop to the Hobby Lobby and picked up several sheets of "Beetle Black Crushed Velvet Scrapbook Paper" (SKU 982348) that I use to flock my lenses and adapters. I also use black velvet sheets that are adhesive-backed that I get there as well. The Beetle Black Crushed Velvet is a goto material that is used by others here as well as those on other macro-micro forums.

I rolled a piece of the Beetle Black (black side in) to make a lens hood to eliminate any fugitive light that might affect the quality of the image. Stray light will result in softness and haze so it is best to eliminate it.

Of course, I had to try it all out so I mounted the 28mm enlarger lens with its DIY hood onto the Vivitar 2X macro focus teleconverter and attached it to the fully extended bellows and staged this preserved green bottle fly for a focus stacking session of its compound eye.