A good wasp. Dead!
Moderators: rjlittlefield, ChrisR, Chris S., Pau
A good wasp. Dead!
A long dead wasp is not an ideal subject, but I posted this because of how well the hairs came out. Best ever for me!
I find furry parts usually dissolve into a hazy mush (in places) when stacked. I learnt to avoid overlapping areas with widely different focal depths (to stop that blurred halo effect on the further-away feature). And extra side-lighting often delineates fine edges better in a deep stack (e.g. hairs). But I did little different to my usual approach here and the hairs came out s-o-o-o well (IMO). Wish they would always come out this clear!
Done with 5x mitty, full frame, pmax stack, no retouching. Shift x,y and scaling turned on (as I always do for low-mag, full-depth stacks). Stacked every other frame with 50% reduction in pre-process (don't often do that). 170 frames used. Right edge cropped off to hide an unsightly ent pin.
As I said, it's a bit of a mystery why the hairs rendered so well in this one. But the moon is in it's waxing gibbous phase - perhaps that's why
I find furry parts usually dissolve into a hazy mush (in places) when stacked. I learnt to avoid overlapping areas with widely different focal depths (to stop that blurred halo effect on the further-away feature). And extra side-lighting often delineates fine edges better in a deep stack (e.g. hairs). But I did little different to my usual approach here and the hairs came out s-o-o-o well (IMO). Wish they would always come out this clear!
Done with 5x mitty, full frame, pmax stack, no retouching. Shift x,y and scaling turned on (as I always do for low-mag, full-depth stacks). Stacked every other frame with 50% reduction in pre-process (don't often do that). 170 frames used. Right edge cropped off to hide an unsightly ent pin.
As I said, it's a bit of a mystery why the hairs rendered so well in this one. But the moon is in it's waxing gibbous phase - perhaps that's why
I don't think the condition of the subject is much of a factor, except that the hairs may be sparser and thicker than on (say) a bee or moth etc.ChrisR wrote:Could it be that the wasp is different - particularly dry, say? Is this with your led panel light? Can you see anything different on a single frame, maybe?
I used Schott goosenecks for this one (at 3000k) to set a near-spotlight on one side and diffuse light on the other side (and top). Three quarters of a ping pong ball as diffuser. I got "mushy hair" with this setup before though so pretty sure that's not a major factor.
Nope - single frames looked "normal" as far as I could tell. I'm wondering if the extra spacing and 50% reduction is a factor. Perhaps I accidentally found an optimum step size for the subject (not dictated by objective DoF with down-sampling doing something "good" too)? I will find another furry critter that exhibits the "mush factor" and try several stacks with different spacings (keeping everything else the same). I'll report back in the techniques section if anything comes of it...
Update: well, I started testing with the most "stack unfriendly" critter I could find (a hairy bee) but couldn't get the hairs to turn to "mush" with any reasonable settings. All went OK.
So I still don't know what I changed to improve things, perhaps several different factors. It's working well though so I've lost any motivation to do lots of deep test stacks to find out precisely what caused the problem in the first place. I'm sure I'll run into again in the course of normal stacking, so I'll investigate then.
Bee - 5x Mitty, 177-image stack.
So I still don't know what I changed to improve things, perhaps several different factors. It's working well though so I've lost any motivation to do lots of deep test stacks to find out precisely what caused the problem in the first place. I'm sure I'll run into again in the course of normal stacking, so I'll investigate then.
Bee - 5x Mitty, 177-image stack.
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