I sometimes try out outlandish and unusual techniques with my photography: mostly they fail but I learn from the experience. Here I describe using a cheap otoscope (a device for looking in the ear) as a macro / close-up camera looking at flowers. This is one that failed!
The technique that I used is fixing the otoscope to a focussing stage on a tripod and taking a number of photos at slightly different distances. The otoscope has its own lighting around the camera lens to illuminate the subject. These photos are then combined in Photoshop using a technique call focus stacking. This is to get a final image that has sharpness from the front to back of the subject.
First, here is the set-up:
Now for some results with a Christmas Cactus flower as the subject:
The base images produced by the otoscope were photographically very poor but it works fine for its intended purpose. As I said, this was an outlandish experiment but I have learnt from the exercise.