The ponds here have finally thawed out. I'm pretty happy with this image from yesterday afternoon and I'd like to offer some notes on the process involved.
The first step was to get the specimen drunk to immobilize her. For one drop of pond water I add one drop of 10% grain alcohol resulting in 5% alcohol pond water. This did not kill the specimen since I could the inner organs still working, but it also did not cause the speciment to contract its extremities.
The next step was the capture. While I could get the entire copepod in the field with a 4X objective, I wasn't getting the detail I desired, so I used a 10x objective and shot three sets of image stacks of the head (58 shots), mide-section (50 shots) and gills (27 shots). To get around any movement caused by organisms swimming pst, I shot the focus stacks by using the sequntial drive mode in my DSLR and holding down the remote button while turning the fine focus dial through the depth of the stack.
I then stitched the three stacks together using Microsoft Image Composite Editor.
The last step was to clean up the dirt and diatoms in Photoshop using a Graphire Wacom tablet and various brush tools (clone, airbrush, burn and dodge).
The result was a pretty detailed image that yielded an acceptable 18.5 by 9 inch print.
Nice.
