Macro photography using an inspection camera

In the last post I talked about the outlandish and unusual techniques I try. For this experiment I tried using an old inspection camera. This is another experiment that failed!

As before with the otoscope, I fixed it to a focussing stage on a tripod and took a number of photos at slightly different distances. Like the otoscope, the inspection camera has its own lighting around the camera lens to illuminate the subject. I then combined the photos in Photoshop using focus stacking. I was less than impressed with how Photoshop did this so I tried the new Affinity 2.o photo editor and this made a much better job of the focus stacking.

First, here is the set-up:

View showing the camera clamped to the focussing stage
Setup showing the camera and image on the laptop screen

Typical image from the inspection camera: 0.3Mpx !!!
How photoshop stacked the images
How Affinity 2.0 stacked the images

As you can see, Affinity 2.o did a far better job…