Fire ant?

[scitch]

I have a colony of fire ants in my front yard. These winged ants were found along with them, but don't appear to be fire ants. Is this a fire ant? There were too many of them to be queen ants.

Sorry about the poor picture, it moved half way through the stack and messed everything up. 85-photo stack completely ruined with one bump of the table. I did everything I could to fix it with retouching, but the overlapping areas (i.e. where the leg overlaps the wing) were impossible to fix. I really like the texture of the abdomen, so I might try it again.

This is a sony a200 with Tamron 90mm macro with 68 mm of extension tubes. I used a diffused flash, soda can reflector and opaque plastic cup diffuser and it still wasn't enough diffusion. ISO-400, F/11, 1 second with some room lights, but mostly illuminated by external flash. There is some cropping, exposure and gamma correction, and slight sharpening.

[Craig Gerard]

scitch,

Fire Ants are nasty!

Some useful information on Fire Ants at link below:
http://fireants.utk.edu/webpages/biologypage.htm

85-photo stack completely ruined with one bump of the table

Yeah, it happens, sometimes a sudden breeze or even opening a door will do the same thing.

Sounds like you have sufficient diffusion. It is most likely the ambient room light that is blowing the highlights during the course of the 1 second exposure; but it may also be due to some light from the flash avoiding your diffusers and/or possibly bouncing off the subject mounting platform.

With a 1 second exposure it is recommended that the ambient room light be almost zero; also switch off any focusing lights during exposure.

Does the Sony a200 have second curtain sync when used with a flash? If so, you want the flash triggered in sync with the second curtain.

Do you have a particular reason for electing to use ISO 400?

Craig

[scitch]

Thanks, Craig.

The room lights were on because the kids were doing homework. I should have waited for them to go to bed. The a200 does not have second curtain It was set at ISO 400 because I was at a science show and it was in a dark room with Tesla coils and explosions (very difficult to photograph) and that setting worked pretty well. I didn't even look at the setting when I started this stack and the first picture looked pretty good, so I didn't even bother with it. I didn't even notice the setting until I was typing this description and looked it up on the photo info. I don't normally use 400, though.

Each member of my family has been stung by these fire ants more than once. Seems to have a slightly different effect on each of us. Makes me itch like crazy, gives my daughter a burning sensation (she's allergic to them too). Not fun.

Mike

[Craig Gerard]

Mike,

Tesla coils and explosions Sounds like fun!

An exposure of 1 second does allow for some camera vibration to settle. Ideally, there should be no light, ambient or otherwise, reaching the sensor until the flash fires in sync with the second curtain. Thereby, the actual exposure (sensor exposed to light) is determined by the flash duration.

If the a200 does not have second curtain sync (or whatever Sony may call it) and if you are using flash, then the 1 second exposure is not necessarily beneficial; but the faster shutter speeds associated with flash exposures will be applicable and may serve the same purpose with regard to reducing the effects of mechanical vibrations.

Try some test shots at 1/60th to 1/125th of a second in the f/5.6 to f/11 range.

Do you have a remote shutter release cable? Which flash unit are you currently using? Does it support TTL metering with the a200? Can you adjust the flash duration with the flash unit in manual 'M' mode?

I tend to play with the flash duration when I have the desired aperture set on the camera. Flash duration usually has settings of 1/1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32, 1/64, 1/128 with increments in between and these can be set manually. If the flash unit is mounted off-camera, then you can also position it closer to or farther away from the subject as seems appropriate. Flash units usually have a 'zoom' feature'. This is normally set according to the focal length of the lense; but it can also be used to good effect to spread or concentrate the light.

Fire Ants are a problem. Do your local authorities have any strategic battle plan or reporting program? (nuke 'em)

Funny thing, while typing this message I could hear a strange noise nearby my work station. I stopped, looked and listened quite a number of times, but couldn't determine just what was making the noise. Turns out to be a large tree frog......and while typing this paragraph, it has suddenly vanished... How does something bright green, the size of a dinnerplate vanish, and how did it get in here in the first place...too many mysteries


Craig

[scitch]

I reported the fire ants to my local vector control over 2 years ago and haven't even received a "We got your message" response from them.

I've said on this list before that I know nothing about photography, nothing about microscopes, and nothing about insects . . . but I have a lot of fun doing this. So, I just play with the settings until something looks pretty good and I try to read a lot. So, some advice from someone knowledgeable about these things, like yourself, is much appreciated.

I do have the remote and I used it for these shots. Here's what the setup was: I put the fire ant on the stage of a Balplan microscope. I put the camera on a tripod pointing straight down. I then used the fine focus on the microscope to lift the ant through the focal range of the camera. Then the external flash was on another tripod with an "Impact" elastic diffuser on it. I put an opaque plastic cup around the end of the macro lens and pointed the diffused flash at that, but the cup was still up above the ant, so there was some light reaching it directly without passing through the cup diffuser. Then, there was an aluminum can reflector behind the ant too.

The external flash that I have is a Bower SFD296S. The instructions that came with it are terrible, not even half a page and obviously translated from another language. It has an "Auto Light Sensor" on the front, but I can imagine that it doesn't work well in this situation, especially since it has no idea how much diffusion I'm using. On the back, it has three settings, "M", "blue", and "red." And then there's an exposure/distance chart.

The family is calling me to come to breakfast, so I'll type more later.

Mike

[rjlittlefield]

OK, back to the ants for a moment.

I was hoping that one of our ant specialists would have chimed in by this point, but since they're apparently off doing other things, I'll jump in.

I have a colony of fire ants in my front yard. These winged ants were found along with them, but don't appear to be fire ants. Is this a fire ant? There were too many of them to be queen ants.

The reproductive process of ants involves a "mating flight", in which large numbers of unmated males and females emerge from the nest in a short period of time. After mating, the females cut off their wings and try to find places to start new colonies, while the males become food for other species.

I'm pretty sure that what you saw was the ground phase of a mating flight. See the video at http://www.extension.org/pages/Video_-_ ... ing_Flight for comparison.

Regarding your photo technique, all sounds good except the part about "some light reaching [the subject] directly without passing through the cup diffuser". Generally when that happens the direct light swamps the diffuse light, so the diffuser ends up providing fill illumination instead of all the illumination. You definitely want to block that direct light, and to get diffused light coming from all around the subject. If the plastic cup is too small to do that, then consider instead using some thin paper like Kleenex tissue to make a "light tent" all around the subject and lens.

--Rik

[scitch]

Good idea, Rik. The long working distance of the setup was the problem. I cut the bottom off of the cup and then it didn't reach all the way to the ant. That's something that I can fix.

The information about the ants is very interesting. Insects are amazing. We spray the ants with traditional ant spray and I know it doesn't kill the colony, but it causes the ant hills to move away from the house. Sounds like we may have prevented several new colonies from forming.

Mike

[scitch]

OK, here's an updated picture from tonight. I used a couple of sheets of tissue paper (not quite a "tent"), removed the diffuser from the flash, lowered the plastic cup diffuser, and turned all of the lights off. Too dark and it was still blown out. I jacked up the exposure setting in photoshop and dimmed the blown out areas and I'm still not happy with it. I loved the colors of the abdomen in the first stack, but the second stack has much more detail on the eye and legs and such (before reducing to web size). This is a Zerene stack of 160 images, ISO-200, 1/40th second, F/5.



I'll keep reading and experimenting.

Mike

[rjlittlefield]

The pattern of reflections suggests that most of your light was still coming from a fairly narrow range of angles near the camera. It needs to be spread out so as to come as evenly as possible from around the whole hemisphere.

Do you have a second camera (quality irrelevant) that you could use to show us a picture of your setup? Sometimes it's easier to suggest improvements if we know exactly what you're doing now.

--Rik

[scitch]

Yes, I can try to take a picture of the setup. It's very unlikely that the light was coming from an angle near the camera. The flash was set up at a 90 degree angle to the end of the lens. I imagine that it was the rounded shape of the insect that caused it to look that way. The light probably came in horizontal to the plane of the microscope slide that he was sitting on, reflected off of the thorax, and then up into the lens. There's only a small section of the thorax that would reflect the light right back into the lens, so it looks like a small-angled light close to the camera.

I'll send either a picture or a diagram of the setup later. I'm off with some macro gear now to go hiking.

Thanks for the advice, I'm getting better and better at this every day because of the help from the forum.

Mike

[scitch]

Here's a different ant that I was playing with a new lighting technique. It's not perfect yet, but shows promise. I simply bounced the flash off of a white sheet of paper arranged in a dome over the ant. If I got some light on the back side, I think it would have been great.



There aren't any really blown out areas, but this ant isn't as shiny and there are some fairly dark areas. This image has quite a bit of photoshopping. It was cropped and then the pin that it was resting on was erased and it had some exposure and gamma correction and some sharpening. It still lacks contrast or crispness or something, I could have played with that some more.

These were taken with the Tamron 90 mm macro and extension tubes.

Mike