>>3349241Sure thing.
Use some tape on the aperture arm to keep the aperture closed a bit more when doing reverse lens stuff without an aperture adapter. That will increase the width of the DOF so you can get more of the subject into focus. Of course, you need more light when you do that. Shoot for f/8-f/11 if you want the sharpest, but max it out to f/22-f/39 or whatever the max is and test how it looks. If you are getting vignetting, try changing the focal length of the zoom lens until that goes away. It may not be as closely magnified, but the resulting images will look a lot better. You'll also have better working distance between the lens front and the subject. I know with the Nikon 18-55mm kit lens reversed you can get so close that you literally can't light the subject properly.
Here's one of my bargain bin lenses. It is a TV camera lens for C-mount (Tamron 12.5-75mm f/1.8). C-mount has an FFD of only 17.526mm. This causes wicked vignetting when used with the long FFD F-mount Nikon cameras. It is basically a dot of image. However, if you reverse a C-mount lens and use it for a macro lens you can get some impressive magnification very easily. In this image, I did freelensing in reverse. The bottom photo is of a millimeter ruler.
I got this Tamron 12.5-75mm f/1.8 for cheap because it has oil on the blade and a close element to the aperture blades had oil on it too. I opened it up and cleaned the element, but since the aperture is manual, it doesn't matter to leave the oil on it and I didn't want to go deeper either.
For this image the lens was set to f/1.8 and 12.5mm giving it a razor thin DOF and about 20mm of working distance (at 75mm FL it has 70mm of working distance). The lens tapers to a point so well at the rear it makes it much easier to work with at such a short working distance. I can get more light to the subject. I bought this lens, because I knew it would work well for a close up working distance macro lens. It does 3.24:1 to 7.83:1 mag.
