Would you mind talking about the turntable a little bit? I've been considering building something like that of my own but I have very little experience in the field.
Cheers.
I've currently been using the motor parts of my 3 axis time lapse rig from
www.dynamicperception.com. The motors can easily be adapted to make custom rigs or turntables, whilst using their NMX controller for the stepper motors. The advantage of using stepper motors for sliders or turntable use, is that you can have incredible fine control of position and speed. Using the controller, you can set repeatable moves/rotations at variable speed...or fire the camera - then move the motors (known as SMS - shoot move shoot), enabling fluid motion of moves even if your camera is shooting long exposure stills. The motors will only move to the next position increment after the camera has taken the exposure, and the file has been written to the card, just like you would configure for a moving camera move in a time lapse.
A good lower budget solution is to make your own small turntable with stepper motor drive with an Arduino type driver, or a simple DC geared motor drive. If using a DC geared motor for macro work , it is almost always best to use a 0.5rpm-3rpm motor with a PWM controller to help control the speed to allow ultra slow moves when needed. The PWM controller acts as a speed controller by using pulse modulation to help the motor to not stall under load at lower voltage. For closeup macro work, it is amazing how slow you might need a motor to turn....often hard to detect movement with naked eye, but when magnified at extreme macro it can easily be seen.
The best DC motor solution I found was to use a 30:1 gearbox combined with either a 0.5rpm or faster speed motor, as shown here:
http://www.servocity.com/wdg30p
