Macro-photography with extension tubes

I bought this. Basically, a macro lens allows for a 1:1 reproduction of reality. If you want a greater magnification ratio, you need to buy that kind of toy.

Here’s a quick example with the mechanism of my cheap watch. The jewel is less than 1 mm long in reality:

Original:



Post-processed:

 

Wow! the clarity/detail possible with that is incredible

How close is the lens from the object?

 

It depends. With the three rings and my 105mm I’d say 10-15 cm. You could get even higher magnification ratios with additional rings. With my 70mm, 2 cm. Sorry, metric system here.

 

Very, very cool........and the "processed" pic would be an HDR image with some other tweaks?

 

Actually, the original pic is a “fake” HDR. I took a RAW photograph and generated three different exposures with a RAW editor. I didn’t push the settings too far because I wanted a natural look.

For the post-processed image, I kind of used the same tricks I used for that pic:
1) I squared the image
2) I isolated the jewel in a new layer
3) I saturated the isolated jewel
4) I duplicated the saturated jewel ("linear dodge" blend mode)
5) Blue filter (Blue + Magenta = cool picture)
6) Added vignette and blur.

Voilà.