Live bugs in technical forum

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lauriek
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Live bugs in technical forum

Post by lauriek »

I stacked some live bugs for a change! :)

Found these on the underside of a Buddlea leaf...

Image

Some sort of shield bug nymphs, with eggs or egg cases, not sure which!

4 Stacks of 8, 6, 9 and 10 images at f5.6 with OM38/2.8, stacked in Zerene stacker and combined with Canon Photostitch.

Harold Gough
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Post by Harold Gough »

My images are a medium for sharing some of my experiences: they are not me.

rjlittlefield
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Post by rjlittlefield »

Very nice -- great control of the whites and darks. :smt023

These are egg cases -- 11 hatched, 1 dried up. The nymphs get out through a hinged circular cap. I don't know what those black triangular things are. Doesn't look like they're part of the hinge mechanism. Could be some disposable body part that the nymphs use to help hatching, then discard. There are only 9 nymphs, so apparently there's been a bit of infant mortality already.

4 stacks -- this is a 2x2 stitched panorama? If so, are you just experimenting with that approach, or was there some other reason to not just back away a little bit?

--Rik

lauriek
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Post by lauriek »

Thanks guys!

Rik, yes its a 2x2 panorama - I was at minimum extension with the 38mm lens and didn't want to waste time swapping lenses (to what I think is an inferior reversed 50mm setup - either OM50/1.8 or Nikkor EL50/2.8). I shot one quick stack which shows most of the critters and egg sacs but some were just going out of frame so I decided to try a quick pano to get some surround in frame.

I suppose I could have removed the bellows and just shot with the camera and lens but was shooting in a hurry and didn't want to spend time changing the setup, I wanted to get these guys shot and back in the garden...

Jody Melanson
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Post by Jody Melanson »

Great image, Laurie. Very nice lighting.
Capturer of God's Creations.

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ChrisR
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Post by ChrisR »

That leaf looks like a loofah :)

Now, second egg case up, right side, is that an unstuck stitching or a stacking symptom?

And my lady wouldn't leave them alive on the leaf.

lauriek
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Post by lauriek »

Thanks!

That's odd, I didn't notice that initially and when you pointed out I assumed it was a stacking halo but it doesn't appear in any of the four input stacks, so it has to be a pano stitching error. In fact there's another stitching error in the nymph on the right, second from the top. I just ran another pano and did the merge by hand and that seems to have removed these glitches, will repost later...

Incidentally the Cabbage white eggs I shot the other day did not get put back in the garden!

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Post by rjlittlefield »

Stack-and-stitch at this scale can be a bit fiddly because of parallax errors.

Each of the stitched frames has a different perspective because the lens's entrance pupil was in a different average position.

As a result, you can only make one depth plane line up perfectly for the stitch.

Anything in front or in back of that plane will not be quite correct, and the stitch blending process is likely to create these ghosts.

This problem can be reduced by using a longer lens and correspondingly longer extension, or minimized by using a rotating pano rig like elf's, or eliminated altogether by using telecentric optics.

On the other hand, manually placing the seam lines to avoid obvious ghosts works pretty well too, and it's a lot easier than elaborate mechanics or strange optics!

--Rik

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