I was born in 1957 and live as a book author and nature photographer in the beautiful Odenwald region of Germany. Here I have been doing macro and micro photography very intensively since about 2010. In the beginning, I was mainly interested in illustrating my books and articles for professional journals (www.knop.de), but soon this form of photography got a momentum of its own, developed almost addictive character.

Usually, aside of normal macro photography, I mainly work with my own construction for focus stacking. I prefer to use Mitutoyo M Plan Apos (5x, 10x and 20x), and for smaller scales (1:1 or 2:1) two lenses from film scanners (Minolta and Nikon). In addition, I work with a microscope (Leitz Orthoplan with a wide range of equipment), very fond of fluorescence, but also incident light with bright field and dark field, transmitted light rather rarely.

Focus stacking I do with the Castel Micro from Novoflex, with external control unit, either with two Godox LED lights or with three or four small Godox flash units. The diffuser is usually a large IKEA lampshade (model „Melodi"), which I have modified accordingly. Under the Novoflex Castel Micro there is a manual linear stage for fine adjustment of the camera position. You could also do manual focus stacking shots with it without conversion - this combination has shown to be very helpful.

The entire design of this setup has also shown to be very useful, because all components can be moved, so that one is extremely flexible when working. For example, the position of the flash units can be in the front of the camera or in the back, and you can very quickly move all the components away for work on the subject at hand.

For macro photography I mostly use the Canon 100 Macro 2.8 L or the Canon MPE 65mm, and on a tripod I also enjoy to use the 35 years old Leica Elmarit 100 mm apo, also with the suitable Elpro 1:1.

At the moment I'm working a little bit into astrophotography, but very laymanlike and first only with the moon - I will see what will develop out of it. For astrophotography I use the Sigma lenses 14-24 mm and 50 mm 1.4 (both A series) and the 150-600 (C series).

Cameras: Canon EOS 5 DSR (mostly for general photography, especially macro) and Canon EOS 5 Mk IV (which mostly sits permanently on microscope or focus stacking setup). Focus Stacking shots I usually do in tethering mode, so they go directly into Capture One to be processed with Helicon Focus.