By the way, for Polaroid filtration I used the filters (“lenses”) in Real 3D glasses from a movie theater. There is more than one thing those glasses can be used for!
After this very important discovery I took a short sabbatical from photographing snowflakes at high magnification (see the banner picture on the top of this page) and changed my macro rig out in my unheated garage to photograph slabs of ice instead. After a great many freezing hours in a plastic tent – often working with bare hands - I refined my techniques to the point where I was even using an aperture as wide as f 5.6 on my macro lens and employing focus stacking in Photoshop CS-5. Talk about a lot of depth of field and super sharpness!
I eventually made a simple rig and developed a technique to photograph the birefringent ice using my cell phone camera. It’s amazing how well those pictures turn out.
Look here for instructions about how to take pictures like mine using a cell phone camera and here to see pictures of what I used to take the high magnification-high resolution pictures using my SLR.
And one last thing - I have well over 1000 pictures in albums on Facebook. Links to most are available here: F 16 – Photography by Tom Wagner. I call it f 16 because that is the lens aperture I often use in the field when taking close-ups of wildflowers etc. That and ISO 100. If you are familiar with photography and manual settings you will realize that that small aperture – although it provides a best depth of field, forces the photographer to use a tripod and relatively long exposures. I do carry a lot of heavy equipment and pray a lot for that incessant wind to break! At least long enough to where I can squeeze in a 1 second exposure.