For those interested, and that have a normal camera (mirrorless/dslr etc), a lot of people know you can buy an adapter and simply reverse mount a lens on your camera to make a quick and dirty macro lens. What many don't know however, is that if you buy some reverse rings, you can reverse mount a lens on the front of another lens to make a very high quality macro lens. You just thread the adapter into the filter threads of both lenses.
If you mount say a 50mm lens on a 50 mm lens, you will get true 1:1 macro. A 50mm lens on a 100mm lens will give you 2:1, a 25mm on a 100mm is 4:1 macro (etc). As long as you start with two lenses of decent quality, you should get a very good macro image, and one that will rival a lot of specialty macro lenses (many of which don't have such high magnifications).
![image showing Used the lens from an old laser pointer to get a close-up of a trilobite fossil's compound eye [OC]](6a4aaac3-626f-5753-b185-0068998b379e.jpg)
WhyWontThisWork on November 17th, 2025 at 23:27 UTC »
Coo But why not just regular zoom?
Primary_Mycologist95 on November 17th, 2025 at 23:56 UTC »
I see in the comments you're using a phone OP.
For those interested, and that have a normal camera (mirrorless/dslr etc), a lot of people know you can buy an adapter and simply reverse mount a lens on your camera to make a quick and dirty macro lens. What many don't know however, is that if you buy some reverse rings, you can reverse mount a lens on the front of another lens to make a very high quality macro lens. You just thread the adapter into the filter threads of both lenses.
If you mount say a 50mm lens on a 50 mm lens, you will get true 1:1 macro. A 50mm lens on a 100mm lens will give you 2:1, a 25mm on a 100mm is 4:1 macro (etc). As long as you start with two lenses of decent quality, you should get a very good macro image, and one that will rival a lot of specialty macro lenses (many of which don't have such high magnifications).
sifuyee on November 18th, 2025 at 00:57 UTC »
For a quick and dirty macro lens you can also put a drop of water right over the iPhone camera lens and get some pretty good results too.