Painted Lady Butterfly Head Focus Stack
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Robert Berdan
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Painted Lady Butterfly Head Focus Stack
Attaching a photograph of Painted Lady Butterfly - stack of 15 images using Canon MP65E lens, Canon 5D Mark II camera and stacked in Photoshop CS2018.
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Robert Berdan
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Transparent Hairs
I am not quite sure what you mean, I did not do anything special with the hairs. The insect was mounted on a pin and I cleaned up a little bit of dirt on the head using photoshop but didn't do anything to the hairs. I jused a simple light and took 15 shots at different focus levels. I might have used a ring flash I can't remember I am always experimenting with different types of lighting.
I hope to do more macrophotography and focus stacking of insects but I am mostly using stacking with photomicrographs when I am able to get the animals to hold still.
I hope to do more macrophotography and focus stacking of insects but I am mostly using stacking with photomicrographs when I am able to get the animals to hold still.
Just surprised you didn't get lots of transparency on the eye hairs - they're spectacularly crisp and clear. Perhaps you stopped the lens down a lot? Maybe f/16 or so? For a 1024 pixels wide image that would work fine. But I (and many others on this forum) tend to shoot wide open for max resolution instead. That comes with a razor-thin shallow DoF so you get transparency that needs a heck of a lot of retouching to fix.
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rjlittlefield
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Beatsy, I agree that the hairs are rendered very well, and I'm pretty sure the reason lies in only 15 shots for a whole butterfly head. Compared to the stuff that you usually do, this is low mag and narrow aperture. If you looked at the individual sources, you would see crisply rendered hairs, with no structure visible in frames behind them to cause the transparency problem. The moral here is to not go for more resolution or more depth than you really care about.Beatsy wrote:Just surprised you didn't get lots of transparency on the eye hairs - they're spectacularly crisp and clear.
--Rik