Blue-rayed Metalmark (Lyropteryx apollonia)

Charles Krebs · Post by **Charles Krebs** » Sun May 15, 2011 8:09 pm

Olympus BHA, BH2-UMA vertical illuminator in darkfield mode. 20/0.56 Neo S Plan objective.

discomorphella · Post by **discomorphella** » Sun May 15, 2011 9:47 pm

Hi Charlie--

Really beautiful. How do the scales look with various polarization tricks? That's one spectacular-looking butterfly, do you have a whole specimen?

David

Marek Mis · Post by **Marek Mis** » Sun May 15, 2011 11:01 pm

Charlie,

I don't know what to say... Simply breathtaking image !! Very, very beautiful !
It slightly reminds me some canvas in close-up.

Best regards

Marek

RogelioMoreno · Post by **RogelioMoreno** » Mon May 16, 2011 3:40 am

Beautil!

Rogelio

Charles Krebs · Post by **Charles Krebs** » Mon May 16, 2011 6:03 pm

Thanks all!

David, I don't have an "overall" shot. I did post a couple of other images from the wings a while back:
http://www.photomacrography.net/forum/v ... hp?t=12406

There's a nice overall shot of the butterfly here:
http://www.learnaboutbutterflies.com/Am ... llonia.htm

The "darkfield" epi illumination was not the easiest to work with on this subject, and I nearly gave up. The shot was bracketed (3 exposures at each step of the stack, 1 stop apart). Then I needed to do both a PMax and DMap of each exposure series in Zerene, and combine the best part of each method in Zerene "retouching". (So there were a total of 6 stacks). Then the 3 different exposure "stacks"were put into Photomatix HDR to produce an HDR image.