24mm PC. Mounting PC lenses on a focus rail might help. I like the
results but they are not quite (when looked at close) up to my
standards. And the PC lenses (as sharp as they are) don’t compare
(due to several reasons) with lenses like the Voigtlander 125mm
APO- Lanthar, at least IMO but the PC lenses are very, very good
lenses.
The Nikon PC lenses were a quick and dirty way to get decent
macro panoramas, and regular landscapes too for that matter.
However, I burnt through the possibilities of the PC lenses fairly
quickly. I then moved on to something more useful to me, the
panoramic head. I wanted to try a regular panorama head with my
CV- 125 and see whether that worked well. I finally received my
RRS panoramic head and a nodal slide. As it is I can attach the
bottom of the pan head to my standard ball head using a Swiss-
Arca clamp and then attach my L-Bracket/Camera to the top of the
nodal slide, also to a Swiss-Arca clamp available there. This allows
me to easily level the camera by leveling my regular ball head. It
sounds like it might be unstable but it is not. It is stable enough for
my purposes.
I then put my Nikon D3s with CV-125 macro lens on the nodal slide,
adjusted it for parallax, and began taking photos. For starters I took
three photos at five or ten degrees from one another and stacked
each of those three views as only the CV-125 can stack. I then
processed the stacks, touched them up where needed, threw them
into PTgui, and out came a panorama. And they look pretty good so
far.
This appears to be the answer to my prayers and I like the way my
in-focus subject is now embedded in surrounding space that shows
something of the context (tells the story) of what this shot is all
about.
And while I am still getting into this it actually looks like it could be
the end of a long journey to find a technique that shows the subject
the way my eyes (my mind) see it. No, it is not perfect but it is more
perfect than anything else I have tried to date. With this approach I
am working away from close macro shots toward embedding those
shots in context and creating the macro landscapes I have been
envisioning for all these years. In some ways I am back to square
one with a lot of learning and experimenting to do, which seems to
be the way I like it.