Adult female praying mantis (Stagmomantis Limbata)

[yeatzee]

Stagmomantis Limbata by yeatzee (now 17, but still learning), on Flickr

97 image stack with my usual El-nikkor 50mm F/2.8 reversed on bellows

3 ikea lamps used for light, styrofoam cup for diffusion. Background was done with paint sample cards from home depot

The back story is pretty simple, my grandpa caught me this female but forgot to bring it over when he came to say hi. I went by his house and picked it up the next day but by than it was having issues. I tried bring it back to health with water and flies but no luck.... than it did something odd. It ate one of its own arms

I have my fare share of experiences with praying mantids and I know this is common if their arm is injured and gets in the way (couple molts and its good to go!) but this girl looked fine. Very odd, but in the end she became very sluggish and could not stand on her own so i did the "humane" thing and put her in the freezer to live on through an image! This is my first praying mantis macro since February

Dmap and Pmax mixed along with my first attempt at blending two images in Gimp. Since I had massive "artifact" lines on the right side I took a single picture from the stack and used its background in place of the stack's. Worked out pretty well, essentially saved the image!

Anywho let me know what you guys think

[abpho]

Nice image. Poor thing though.

[rjlittlefield]

This looks great. I'm sorry to hear about the mantis's health problem, but it sounds like you didn't do anything to cause those.

Using a single background image to paint over the artifact lines is a standard way of recovering from slight misalignment. I gather you used Gimp to do that, and that would be good exercise. Usually it can be done faster while you're still in ZS, by using a big retouching brush and the first image, which by definition covers the whole area of the output.

--Rik

[yeatzee]

Thanks Ab.

This looks great. I'm sorry to hear about the mantis's health problem, but it sounds like you didn't do anything to cause those.

Using a single background image to paint over the artifact lines is a standard way of recovering from slight misalignment. I gather you used Gimp to do that, and that would be good exercise. Usually it can be done faster while you're still in ZS, by using a big retouching brush and the first image, which by definition covers the whole area of the output.

--Rik

Normally I would use zerene like I have before, but in this case the first image still had those streaks and when retouching I could not use the "un-aligned" image to do the correction. No idea why since this is the first time, but it worked out in the end anyhow

Thanks by the way Rik, couldn't have done it without ya!