Hi from another newbie

[tpe]

I am an ex molecular biologist that has always had a side fetish for insects. I have been trapped in the facination for discovering their hidden worlds and can dissapear into the hedgwork for weeks on end. This forum is such a treat to find. I really look forward to trying out some of the techniques everybody here has been using.

Hopefully with the information here I should be able get much closer than I have up untill now and it seems to be a unique forum that covers almost everything. The photos here are a dream come true so I am looking forward to getting up the courage to pester everyone with all the very silly questions I have.

Thanks

tim

Honey bee Apis mellifera



European green sheild bug Palomena prasina



Dance fly Empis livida?

[Ken Ramos]

Welcome aboard there Tim, glad to have ya. Silly questions in search of knowledgable answers are quite welcome here Got to say you really posted some great photographs to start off a first post. We will be looking for more Tim!

[beetleman]

And a great welcome to you also Tim. Excellent , excellent photos. I feel the same way about the forums as you do. The fly photo is an eyepopper for sure. I don`t think he has his girlfriend in his grasp We will want to see more from you. If you havn`t already looked, make sure you do not miss the Micro forums.....lots of cutting edge photos in there also. Make yourself at home.

[rjlittlefield]

Tim, welcome aboard.

I checked out your web site a little bit when I authorized your registration -- very impressive illustrations. I also noticed a couple of your postings on other forums, looking for information about focus stacking. Several of us have quite a bit of experience with that, and we'll be happy to discuss technique until your eyes glaze over.

I agree with these other guys that your opening salvo of photos is great. I especially like the robber fly. We look forward to seeing lots more of your work!

--Rik

[salden]

Hi Tim and welcome. I like your shield bugs. They are different from the ones I have in my yard. Ask any questions you need to and post away. Looking forward to viewing more of your work.

[tpe]

Thanks very muuch for the warm welcome.

Hey Sue no your bugs are much nicer, i thought you posted a green stink bug at one point, but i cant seem to find it now, i think that it was the US version of our one, and would have liked to compare them, these are porbably one of the fist nymphs and look quite different from the adults, you are so lucky haveing so many, i would almost kill to find a mantis in my garden I think this was those bugs mummy or daddy and the european equivilant of your green stink bug http://www.scientificillustration.net/_ ... bug_01.jpg .

Rik, so you found out i am a minotla man , sorry for the state of that site, it was hastily put up, but thanks for reminding me i must do something about it .

Yes i have really noticed the amount of know how on stacking here, i have gone through most of it, some of it too quick, but it was great to see all those illustrations with focus points and objects etc.

But it is crewel saying you are looking forward more pictures, tooo much to live up too, see below, my first question (I should probably post it in the tech forum, but i am not realy sure i am ready to ask it properly yet) and its all problems .

Hey Doug, the micro work is really impressive, but then everything here is, it puts everyone at my old microbiology lab to shame, it appears that enthusiasm is the best way to get real quality.

Those flys are mercinary, in the evening they all hang around with their prize and their girl, there were loads of them all turning into a kind of terminal threesome http://www.scientificillustration.net/_ ... ner_02.jpg
not wildly sharp but scares me anyway .


Thanks Ken it is good to be here, and to see there are so many fun gis [sik] here, I had to open the thread to get it, but i am ready for the next one



So here is my third attempt at stacking, i am a little dissapointed as i had to make a bracket to fix the camera to a verticle mill as i dont have a focusing rail and it took a while.



And 100% crop close up of some of the worse areas...





This time camera moved instead of refocusing the lense, from all the stacking 101s this is more reliable than refocusing the sigma 105 macro lens because it actually moves less than the front objective would when turning the focus ring?
You can see where it is worse at the bottom of the frame where the stigma meets the pollen (see 100% crop) When i ran through the 60 odd frames (untill i ran out of space) at f10 it looked like the stigma moved through about 7% of the frame as camera moved closer to the subject, should i be refocusing and moving the camera? would that even be possible. And if so would it get rid of that srang platic melting effect on the rhs of the stigma on the hairs in front of the pollen at the bottom of the crop?

There was also a lot of noise, more than i usually get, I can't actually get that many pictures in raw format on my CF card, Should i drop the number of pictures in the stack and use RAW format, or is it better to have more pictures in .jpg?

What else is wrong/fixable?

If you managed to read all the way down here, wow, and thanks

tim

[rjlittlefield]

Tim,

Yep, I did manage to read all the way down here. A couple of times in fact. But I've had a hard time cracking free enough time to write any answer of the quality deserved by your work. I'm very appreciative of these latter pictures, having tackled a similar subject myself not too long ago (here).

You've really done an excellent job with this very difficult subject. Both the scale bar and the fact that you're shooting this with a Sigma 105 at f/10 suggest that this must be big pollen, but even so, seeing all those spines is a treat!

To answer a few of your questions...

1. I always shoot deep stacks in JPG. It's just too painful to shoot them in raw, and I've determined by testing that with my camera (Canon 300D) and my subjects & lighting, there's no significant quality loss in going with JPG.

2. At higher magnifications, I always focus by moving the camera+lens versus the subject using a mill table (see setup here), because it gives me fine calibrated steps. At lower magnifications, especially below 1:1, it can be better to refocus by twisting the lens ring, because that results in less movement of the entrance pupil. That's always the goal -- to move the entrance pupil as little as possible, measured in angular shift from the edges of the subject.

3. The "melting plastic" effect looks like a stacking artifact that is commonly produced by the CombineZ software. Helicon Focus usually does not have that problem, and there are some other ways to use the most recent versions of CombineZM that will also avoid it, but that will have to wait for another day 'cuz it's bedtime now. In any event, changing the way you focus will probably not help much with this issue.

Hope this helps -- maybe we can discuss more over the weekend.

--Rik

[Wim van Egmond]

Beautiful images, Tim!

I think you will always get these artefacts with stacking, at least I always have them. when there are overlapping areas with a distance between them you will get a bit vagueness.

By the way. I usually move the subject instead of the camera or lens. The subject is much lighter.

Wim

[rjlittlefield]

By the way. I usually move the subject instead of the camera or lens. The subject is much lighter.

Wim, can you say a few more words about exactly how you do this? Or better yet, post a topic with pictures over in the Technical forum.

I get the general impression that most microscope users move the subject, most bellows users move the camera+lens, and users of macro lenses with focusing rings do whatever seems best at the time. The end result is the same in any case, as long as movement is along the optical axis. Everything else is just tradeoffs of the mechanics and ergonomics.

There was extended discussion of this issue last fall, here in the Technical forum. But it's good to revisit issues from time to time, collecting whatever new ideas have come up in the meantime. Cool techniques for moving the subject while keeping everything properly aligned would be most appreciated!

Many thanks,
--Rik

[Wim van Egmond]

I used to use a detached cross table of an old microscope in order to move the subject back and forwards but you can think of all kinds of solutions.

More about that later, I need some time to find the right english words for all the technical bits. I am not very technical.

Wim