This is from a wing that was not in the best of shape, but I kept looking and located this "magical" little patch of scales.
Taken with the Nikon 20/0.40 CF M Plan on bellows. It is 70 images stacked with Zerene.
This was illuminated a little differently from my normal approach for this subject. I have a hemispherical ping-pong ball diffuser attached to the tip of the objective. But co-axially I have mounted a fiber optic ring-light around the objective. It is positioned to illuminate the ping-pong ball very evenly throughout 360 degrees. It's an extremely flat light, far too flat for most subjects. But it really sets off the iridescent scales!
Wow Charles, just amazing. They appear to be translucent. Probably a dumb question, but just how big was the wing and did the colour attract you to it or did you only see the colours when you uploaded it from your camera?
Sam
'To see a world in a grain of sand And heaven in a wild flower. Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour.' William Blake
It's a large moth (wing easily 2 inches or more in length), but the area of the wing that is represented here measures about 1.125 x 0.755mm (0.044 x 0.03 inches).
It's a subject that I've photographed often over the years. These particular wing scales are somewhat translucent, and have little pigment coloration. The colors you see here are all the result of the interference of light caused by the microstructures in the wing-scale (iridescence). These colors can be unbelievably "pure" and intense when illuminated as I have done here.
Not the same. The pictures in the Salalis parhassus: Papilio ulysses thread you referenced were taken on a microscope used a "BD" type objective in the darkfield mode. This is where the light comes through the "collar" around the objective. At the tip of the objective the light is reflected onto the subject at an oblique angle, from a 360 degree "circle". It is very much like using a ringlight with more conventional macro shots.
Here I used a f/o ringlight concentric with the objective, so in effect it would have illuminated as you would expect of a ringlight. But I added a hemispherical ping-pong ball diffuser to the end of the objective. The position of the ringlight was such that it bathed nearly the entire outer surface of the ping-pong hemisphere in a very even light, 360 degrees around. In the past I would use this diffuser with two or three light guides or flash units placed at various distances from the "dome". So that light was very diffused, but could have a bit of directionality to it.
So this is about as flat and fully diffuse as I can get. As I said, it is too flat for the vast majority of subjects, but it really seemed to produce intense interference colors from nearly the full surface of each scale.
