Moth, Partial Wing Joint/Scales

Ken Ramos · Post by **Ken Ramos** » Sun Aug 20, 2006 12:50 pm

I am all the time finding bits and pieces of insects lying around in the yard. I came across a single wing that appears to have come from a Luna moth. I guess a bird or bat got the rest.

Sony DSC-P200
1/5 sec. @ f/2.8 ISO 100 EV -0.3 step
Zeiss Axiostar Plus
2.5X/0.06 A-Plan objective
Duel Pipe Fiber Optic Halogen illumination

While I was playing around with this thing, I decided to grab a couple of shots of the wing scales. These things fascinate me, there is such a diversity in shape and size.

Sony DSC-P200
1/6 sec. @ f/2.8 ISO 100 EV -0.3 step
Zeiss Axiostar Plus
10X/0.25 A-Plan
Duel Pipe Fiber Optic Halogen illumination

beetleman · Post by **beetleman** » Sun Aug 20, 2006 9:31 pm

great pictures Ken...The first on reminds me of the horror movies "like a ripped off Limb" of some creature

. The one of the scales is a different story...very cool, almost like a colorful bird

.

Charles Krebs · Post by **Charles Krebs** » Sun Aug 20, 2006 10:17 pm

Yup... wing scales are indeed one of the most fascinating nature subjects. Liked 'em when I started snapping pictures about 40 years ago and still do!

(They also "stack" nicely Ken... you're just going to have to get over the phobia about downloaded software ,

,and play around with HF.)

Ken Ramos · Post by **Ken Ramos** » Mon Aug 21, 2006 2:43 am

Thanks Charlie, Doug.

Maybe one day I will download HF but I really would like to have the program on CD. I like to have something a little more tangable for my money I suppose.

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Wed Aug 23, 2006 9:51 pm

Ken Ramos wrote:Maybe one day I will download HF but I really would like to have the program on CD. I like to have something a little more tangable for my money I suppose.

Ken, it's no problem at all to get HF on a CD.

There are some preliminaries you need to do before you get the CD. (You know what's coming next, right?

)

First, download the installer. It's about 8.5 MB of program, documentation, and sample data. Run the installer. You have 30 days of fully functional usage starting then. If you like the program, then you follow the HF web site's links to buy it. The whole process is a bit more complicated than I would like, but basically you give them a credit card number and about a day later after an email and a couple of web accesses you have your very own fully personalized registration key consisting of about 260 hex digits. You present the registration key to the program, it says "thanks, you're now registered" (or words to that effect), and you're good to continue running the program for however long your license covers. (I bought mine for a year, $69.95.)

Now, here's the good part.

Using your favorite CD burner, take the installer program that you downloaded, the registration key that you got for your money, and maybe even the .html invoice that you saved from your browser, and write them all to a previously blank CD. Voila, your very own personalized Helicon Focus installation CD! Much better than anything you could get from a store!!

Seriously, I strongly recommend using this procedure. I've never heard of anything remotely comparable to Helicon Focus that would come as a prewritten CD in a box, shrinkwrapped and available at your local software store. Come to think of it, though, I'm pretty sure you could get some local computer geek to do the procedure for you, for a few dollars more. Maybe even get a nicely printed label on the CD.

Give it a shot -- you've got nothing to lose but some OOF images and a bunch of hours.

--Rik