I don't think you are going to get what you want with a macro lens.
This calls for a micro lens or being microscope adapter.   Both of those are
outside my experience and need so I don't have much personal experience to
base any additional help.  Sorry.

I don't think you will be happy with macro in this instance. Macro is good
for a "magnification" of 1x to 5x and my be able to go to 10x with some
aberation around the edges. At this mag factor the DOF is so tight that the
difference between the distance from the center of the lens to the subject
and the distance from the lens to the side of the subject would be more than
the DOF and so either the center of the image would be in focus or the edge,
not both.

So your need of making .5 to 1 mm full frame would be almost impossible and
so badly formed that you may get only a few clear pixels in the center of
the image. For the level of magnification you are looking for you would be
better off going with a microscope and adapter. Even then you may have
problems with flat focus. You may have to center the subject in the image
and crop the out of focus edges before attempting the stitching.

Good luck

Randy

Eric,

You need to learn about 'extension tubes'. They are simple, inexpensive, and
yield amazing results when doing macro photography -- even without a
so-called macro lens. I have the Kenko versions. Here's a picture of them:

http://www.pbase.com/image/85976907

You'll need to consult Canon's website to see what lenses are compatible
with them. There's a spreadsheet somewhere on the Canon site that gives
these details.

I use the extension tubes with the Canon 24-70mm f/2.8 lens and have taken
some incredible pictures of little bugs. I sent some of these pictures to a
friend of mine and she threw up (she really did). So, you know they were
good pictures.

I'm not sure you can get a 1mm object to fill your camera's sensor, but just
using a macro lens won't get you there (for sure).

If you can't get the information you need to confirm whether you can do what
you want (or not), then post a reply and I'll try it on my setup.

Bob

I don't know what your ultimate goal might be....BUT....
The following option may work for you and it is very inexpensive.
See:  http://www.jr.com/JRProductPage.process?Product=4220456
Bob Williams

I have done a lot of work with photography of surgical instruments for
ophthalmology including vitrectomy instruments which have a barrel and
cutting head of 1mm. These are made of stainless steel and anodized
steel or titanium. I mostly photographed them from 1:1 to 5x. My best
results were with a 120mm f5.6 Apo-Macro Nikkor a lens designed for
this magnification, some images were enlarged to 40x72 inches for
trade shows. Anything over 5x the metal texture got in the way of the
overall appearance/funtionality of the instrument photograph. You
didn't say what the purpose of the photos were or the the material you
were photographing but very high magnifications lower your depth of
field considerably, for this reason I shot with a 4x5 view camera so I
could vary my plain of focus. Also how close you get to the subject
affects your lighting, with most lenses at 10X mag you will be within
a few millimeters of the subject, and if the subject is reflective the
lens will make any lighting difficult. Consider fiber optics for
lighting.
You have a good solid stage to work on but pay close attention to how
your camera is mounted a heavy tripod, studio stand or copy stand is
necessary. At 10X you should look for a macro photography camera
system so everything can be steady, granted this is an expensive
proposition, but high mag photography can be a frustrating experience
if the equipment is getting in your way.

Tom

Have you considered a camera with a small sensor? Would be better
capable of photographing very small objects.

If I understand correctly, you need a magnification of around 10 to
20. By this I mean that the image size on the sensor of the camera is
10 to 20 times as big as what you are shooting.

I agree with some other posters that your best solution might be a
microscope.

You should also be able to achieve this by reversing an ordinary Canon
lens. A little background first... Lenses are designed to work best at
particular subject and lens extension distances... normally the
optimal subject distance is from infinity to around 10 times the focal
length, and this corresponds to a lens to sensor distance of
approximately the focal length plus a couple of millimeters.

To use an example, consider a "normal lens", which would be about 35mm
focal length for the Excess Eye (XSi). Depending in which lens
exactly, it will work great focused from infinity to about 300 mm from
the lens.

If you try to get closer by using extension rings, you will be able to
focus closer, but the optical quality starts to deteriorate a bit.
When you get so close that you are near 1:1 (image and subject about
the same size), image quality is worse, and continues to get worse as
you go greater than 1. To some extent you can manage by stopping down,
but that is of limited use.

The fix is to reverse the lens when you need to shoot well over 1:1.
Then the lens becomes happy again because its distances once again are
close to its ideal distances... except that everything is in reverse.
Thus the distance from the back of the lens to the subject is now
about the same as lens-sensor when shooting at normal distances, and
the distance from the front of the lens to the sensor is now around
300 mm or greater, which is about right for this lens. The light rays
don't mind going backwards.

To give some examples ---

You are shooting a pair of shoes or whatever with the lens mounted
normally. The distance to the subject is 400 mm. With that distance,
the magnification on the sensor will be m = 0.1, and the lens
extension is 3.4mm... so the distance from the center of the lens to
the sensor is 35 + 3.4 = 38.4 mm.

Now you reverse the lens using a reverse adapter, and shoot something
very tiny. The lens-subject distance is very close at 38mm, the
lens-sensor is racked out to 420 mm, and the magnification is now
11:1. The size of the subject  will be about 2 mm. The numbers are
similar to above but reversed. Image quality should be great.

But depth of field will be very shallow, about 0.5 mm according to my
calculations. And lighting the subject will be tricky.

I'm guessing you will find it easier to use a microscope for this kind
of application, but reversing the lens is a cheap and potentially good
way to do it.

Archibald

You are getting a lot of wonderful information... almost
all of which is correct, but totally useless for your
needs!

Given what you have said you want to photograph, you
CANNOT do it with typical "macro" techniques.

Okay, that means between 14.8:1 and 29.6:1 magnification.

To put it simply:  You can't do that with a macro lens on
a DSLR.

You need a microscope.  You might also want to look at
other types of cameras, because while it can be done
with a DSLR that may not be the most reasonable in terms
of either convenience or price.

Do you want _each_ image to be even higher magnification
than stated above, and for the resulting final product
to be as described above????  Or do you mean each
exposure will capture 0.5 to 1.0 mm of a larger object?

If you mean that each exposure will capture 1mm of an
object, then a typical dissecting microscope would be
appropriate (and would be very convenient to mate with
your X-Y state).  Another possibility is a toolmakers
metallurgical microscope.

If the total object is 1mm, you need even greater
magnification.  In that case the metallurgical
microscope is what you'll need.  And even if you want
1mm portions of a larger object, you might want to look
at this technique anyway, as it offers more flexibility
than a dissecting scope.

The feature you'll want to look for is the ability to
mount it in a way that you can use your X-Y stage (which
is not true of all metallurgical scopes).  Another
feature, which is almost universal though there is a
chance you don't need it, is episcopic (or "epi" for
short) illumination.  That uses a beam splitter to
illuminate the object through the same optical path that
you view it.  (That is probably _very_ useful to you.)

Metallurgical microscopes also use special objective
lenses that allow a greater lense to object distance.

Microscopes can be very expensive, but it is unlikely
that you need a fancy one.  It should be fairly easy to
find an older used model that will do fine.  They often
are available on eBay at reasonable prices, as are the
parts and pieces such as objectives and "relay lenses"
for photography.  Keep in mind that objective lenses are
matched to the eye pieces (and to the relay lenses used
for projecting into a camera), and hence should not
necessarily be mixed and matched between manufacturers.

This is a *large* topic, which will take a good deal of
research for you to get a handle on the perspective.
Here is a set of tutorial articles on photography through
a microscope:

http://www.microscopyu.com/articles/digitalimaging/index.html

One thing to note is that due to the optical limitations
of a microscope, the resolution of photographed images
is limited.  The practical effect is that high
resolution cameras are *not* necessary, and might even
be less useful!  A very fancy DSLR is not going to get
any better an image that some of the nicer, much less
expensive, webcam's available!  And adapting/using a
web cam with a microscope may be much less expensive and
easier to operate than mounting a DSLR on the same
scope!  In the end, the images are not different.