Not Just another Fly

[Tony T]

For anyone with as cold and snowy winter as we get here in the Maritimes you may appreciate that this fly was a welcome sight . Today it got way above freezing, 1st insect of the year.
These flies are predators of earthworms as larvae and overwinter as adults. This guy is old. When fresh they have beautiful golden yellow hair over much of the thorax, a little bit here beneath the wing base.
It's a Blowfly, genus Pollenia, length 11mm.
105mm Micro + 4T, f22, 10 images @ 0.63mm stacked with helicon Focus; full frame.
Note the blurry tip of left wing, sharp in one one of the images, obviously HF somehow got confused.

[rjlittlefield]

This is an excellent photo, shows off the beast to good advantage.

That left wing tip is a puzzler, though. HF is known to sometimes create "mush" in areas where even the sharpest frame does not have much contrast. But I've never seen it mess up around anything as contrasty as those big veins. You sure you included the sharp frames in the set of source images that HF processed?

--Rik

[tpe]

Very nice and great colouring at the bottom of the abdomen. I dont think the online res does the picture justice as the murray patterningin is comming out in the eyes on my moniter. It would be nice to see the high res version. How come the legs are all to the back and go out of frame, is it mounted there or is it lying on its side?

tim

[jmlphoto]

great pose on that one, i can see him saying up up and away!

[Tony T]

great pose on that one, i can see him saying up up and away!

Great answer to tpe's question "How come the legs are all to the back and go out of frame,"
- photo of fly just taking off, be nice if it was true, but alas just a mounted fly.

[Tony T]

Rik commented "That left wing tip is a puzzler, though. HF is known to sometimes create "mush" in areas where even the sharpest frame does not have much contrast. But I've never seen it mess up around anything as contrasty as those big veins. You sure you included the sharp frames in the set of source images that HF processed? "
Great insight Rik. Fortunately I still had the original images that made the stack. The 1st image I took and the 1st in the stack was with the left wing tip (supposedly) in sharp focus. However, that wing tip was not in focus on the original single image. I did not realize it's softness until I took a closer look at it just now. So the HF stack is the result of sloppy technique and not a fault of HF. I do try to begin and end a shoot with the focus beyond the image so that I can select the central images that have the extremes of the object in sharp focus. But screwed-up for this fly.

tpe commented "It would be nice to see the high res version"
OK here is a full-sized crop of the head. Note that if I was just photographing the head I would have used a differnt set-up so that the head filled most of the frame and not just the small portion as in the original photo.

[cactuspic]

Good shot Tony. It is a shame about the soft bit on the wing. Sometimes it is harder to find the exact leading edges that you want to keep in focus.

Irwin

[rjlittlefield]

Tony,

From what shows in the crop, the full frame would be a very cool display print!

I'm not sure, but I think I'm seeing just a bit of sharp/blur/sharp/blur banding on the eye. That suggests that the focus step was just a hair thicker than it might have been, if the goal was to capture absolutely the most info available at this magnification and f/stop. On the other hand, it also means that the stack was efficient in the sense of minimum frames to get a Really Nice result.

On single stacks, I'm generally guilty of overkill -- aperture optimized for resolution, focus step about 2/3 of what it could be, and several extra frames on each end to cover the fairly common case that what I think I'm seeing through the viewfinder is not quite right. It takes a bit of extra time and wears out my shutter faster, but for me most of the time goes into specimen prep and post-stack processing anyway. (Besides which, I'm still on the original shutter of my original 300D. When is that thing gonna wear out so I can buy a newer one?! )

Tim, I'm presuming you meant "Moire" pattern in the eyes? I thought maybe it was something about the anatomy of this fly, but Googling on "murray pattern" didn't turn up anything relevant.

--Rik

[Graham Stabler]

Is is possible to add multiple copies of the image that includes the tip of the wing to the stack so increasing the weighting and perhaps enhancing the result? I don't really know anything about the process, only what I have imagined.

Graham

[Tony T]

Rik said "I'm not sure, but I think I'm seeing just a bit of sharp/blur/sharp/blur banding on the eye.
That suggests that the focus step was just a hair thicker than it might have been, IF the goal was to capture absolutely the most info available at this magnification and f/stop.
On the other hand, it also means that the stack was efficient in the sense of minimum frames to get a Really Nice result".

The f-stop and stepping were chosen to get a decent image of the whole fly (less leg tips).
If I had wanted just a head shot to show individual ommatidia I would have used greater mag, larger f-stop, smaller steps. I see you IF.
Note, wing tip to wing tip was measured at 8.1 mm.

This brings up an important point. I have posted similar images on other sites and got comments about how "great" the images were. One gets complacent and gets no incentive to improve. Try posting a less-than-absolutely-perfect image on this site, one that has been slightly altered, maybe with some cloning, and beware. There will be comments, but somewhat in contrast to those from other sites!
I love it, just what is needed for a photographer to hone his/her technique. A wonderful wake up call.
I think all the nature (close-up) photographers who post elsewhere should post here, they will soon find how dissatisfied they are with their images and will definitely improve.