Oregano and insect

[dougsmit]

I decided to play with image stacking using fewer originals than usual to see what happened. Usually I try to stack so everything is in focus but that sometimes results in confusing images. Here I only show a image when it would produce a sharp area on something I considered significant. As a result there are areas of unsharpness that are between planes of sharpness. Perhaps this is inappropriate from a scientific sense but it might make it easier to produce an 'art' rendering by avoiding sharp things that do not add to the beauty of the scene. Opinions welcomed.

Oregano flower (entire scene about 3mm high - right panel is an unreduced crop of the whole shown reduced on the left)



Canon 30D Leitz Focotar 50mm f/4.5 Enlarging lens on bellows

Anyone care to guess as to the ID of the insect?

[MacroLuv]

Great job Doug!
A springtail, I would say. But I think they are not members of Class Insecta but Entognatha.

[beetleman]

It does look pretty sharp to me Doug. I thought you were going to give us a recipe for an italian dish called "Oregano and insects" I was surprised Nikola did not say that he had a recipe for the same thing (he is the recipe man! )

[rjlittlefield]

Perhaps this is inappropriate from a scientific sense but it might make it easier to produce an 'art' rendering by avoiding sharp things that do not add to the beauty of the scene. Opinions welcomed.

What you've done is very attractive, and it works great for me.

Back when I took my Scientific Illustration class in college, the instructor explained to us that any technique was fair game as long as it succeeded in accurately conveying the information.

If having everything sharp is confusing, then by all means render the other stuff fuzzy. (Just tell us what you've done, so that the more literal-minded of us don't get confused and infer that fuzzy image equals fuzzy subject. )

This brings to mind the possibility of using a photo editing tool to artificially blur everything that's not of interest, even if it happens to be in the same plane. I cannot recall having seen that done, but it seems at least a worthy experiment.

Anyone care to guess as to the ID of the insect?

I'm betting on thrips (Thysanoptera) -- see for example Charlie's great images at http://www.photomacrography.net/forum/v ... php?t=2216.

--Rik

[dougsmit]

I'm betting on thrips (Thysanoptera) -- see for example Charlie's great images at http://www.photomacrography.net/forum/v ... php?t=2216.

--Rik

Thanks. My latest guess is a flower thrip in the genus Frankliniella but 'guess' is the operative word here.

[Ken Ramos]

Great shots there dougsmit I would guess a thrip also, since they are quite common on flowers.