Fruit Fly

pwnell · Post by **pwnell** » Thu Sep 13, 2012 7:19 pm

I like red wine. A lot. So what do you do as macro photographer when fruit flies invade this peaceful tranquility? You catch them and photograph them of course!

I had some issues with a deep stack on the second portrait. The antennae did not stack properly. With Rik's help I managed to get a better stack. Both are ZereneStacker PMax, and taken at 10x (the second one has an additional 1.6x magnification). Oh if the sharpening is a bit too much blame Flickr. The second stack is 701 images deep

20120910-DSLR_IMG_0001_1.jpg by pwnell, on Flickr

20120911-DSLR_IMG_0234-Edit.jpg by pwnell, on Flickr

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Thu Sep 13, 2012 8:21 pm

Excellent -- this came out great! That 10X NA 0.40 sure is sharp, but the wide aperture means deep stacks.

I know you had to un-check all those alignment parameters and do a Stack Selected on the antennae, but I'm curious to know exactly how you did the final merging of antennae over the eyes. Was that done with the Photoshop layers with masks and Darken/Lighten mode, or did you come up with some better way to do it?

--Rik

pwnell · Post by **pwnell** » Thu Sep 13, 2012 8:37 pm

rjlittlefield wrote:I know you had to un-check all those alignment parameters and do a Stack Selected on the antennae, but I'm curious to know exactly how you did the final merging of antennae over the eyes. Was that done with the Photoshop layers with masks and Darken/Lighten mode, or did you come up with some better way to do it?

--Rik

I'd love to know how to do the darken/lighten cloning, but I don't. I used photoshop to merge the two layers, by using a layer mask at 400x and picking out the antenna by hand.

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Thu Sep 13, 2012 8:52 pm

That works. The single mask is more labor intensive, but it can make a better result too.

--Rik

Jacek · Post by **Jacek** » Fri Sep 14, 2012 4:33 am

excellent photos

Charles Krebs · Post by **Charles Krebs** » Fri Sep 14, 2012 12:08 pm

Waldo,

Excellent work!

With only 3mm of working distance I am curious, how did you illuminated these?

pwnell · Post by **pwnell** » Fri Sep 14, 2012 12:31 pm

Charles Krebs wrote:Waldo,

Excellent work!

With only 3mm of working distance I am curious, how did you illuminated these?

I used this:

Very unsophisticated. Basically three Ikea lamps to the back, left and right of the objective. The objective is wrapped inside a paper cylinder (shaded image). This extends to below the subject.

It is very hard to work like this because I cannot see anything. My first subject was bumped off the pin because I drove the objective into the pin

PS: Exposure times were ISO200 and 1/8 so long exposures were needed.

Marek Mis · Post by **Marek Mis** » Wed Sep 19, 2012 1:53 pm

Waldo,

Excellent and beautiful photomicrographs !

Marek