Bad Hair Day

[georgedingwall]

Hi All,

I think this is the caterpillar of the Garden Tiger Moth - Maybe. It looks a lot like the caterpillars I used to call "Woolly Bears" when I was a kid, and my insect book says that they are the same thing.

Seemed to me he/she/it was having a bad hair day.

This image was taken with my new macro setup and is a stack of 50 images moved approx 0.1 mm between exposures. The field width is about 7 mm.

I had a lot of trouble with this beastie. I had to do the image sequence three times. On the first two occassions, I think I was fighting gravity.

I had put the caterpillar into my killing jar for about an hour and then placed it on a dead flower in my setup. The problem was that as I was taking the image sequence the caterpillar began settling down on the flower. I thought, at first, it was still alive, but I knew it couldn't be.

I then thought that maybe there was some sort of post mortem muscle contractions. In the end I settled for gravity. I left the caterpillar on the setup and checked back regularly until it stopped moving. I then positioned it in the setup ready for the final shoot.

When I finished the stack I thought I must have got some more movement. Some of the spines seem to be double, as if one image was a little offset from the others. When I went through the individual images again, there were no offsets. What appeared to be duplicate spines were in fact present on the caterpillar as closely spaced pairs of spines.

Anyway, here's the final result.



Nikon D200 with 105mm Nikon Micro Lens
2 X teleconverter with 2 sets of extension tubes.
1/250 sec @ F8 ISO100
3 flash heads.
Stack of 50 images with 0.1 mm adjustment between exposures.
Stacked with Helicon Focus 4
Finished in Photoshop CS2.

[Ken Ramos]

Excellent shot George, it is a wonder you could get as good a shot as you did through all of that fuzz. Amazing what one can see in the reflections of its eyes. Thanks George.

[beetleman]

First rate stack job George. Very interesting creature also. "We want More"

[georgedingwall]

Hi Ken,

Excellent shot George, it is a wonder you could get as good a shot as you did through all of that fuzz. Amazing what one can see in the reflections of its eyes. Thanks George.

I think you can probably see me worrying over whether my dead caterpillar is about to move again. Just as well I had some clothes on!

First rate stack job George. Very interesting creature also. "We want More"

You asked for more and you're wish is my command.

Here is another 50 frame stack of the beast, this time a little more on the profile so you can get a better view of the eyes. The setup up was otherwise the same as the face-on image.

I'm going to have to get a bigger hard drive if I keep taken these big stacks.



Bye for now.

[rjlittlefield]

George,

Nice job with the stacking! I can definitely empathize with your woes about slow movement of the specimen. It's a common problem with deep stacks. I've had flowers wilt, insects slump, mushrooms curl, and probably some other problems I don't even remember. Fortunately the problems seem to get less severe with more experience, though I'd be hard pressed to say exactly why.

About the spines... This is a very interesting specimen. The thing that I notice is that the spines are feathered -- each long spine has a bunch of short spines coming off the sides of it. I have not noticed that before with caterpillars, but I'll sure be on the lookout for it in the future. Honeybees have a similar structure around their faces, as Charlie Krebs showed us in one of his early stacks.

These images seem very free of artifacts. Which version of HF are you using?

--Rik

[georgedingwall]

Hi Rik,

Thanks for the comments. I've a way to go before I can get images like Mr.Kreb's bee eye, but I making progress.

George,


These images seem very free of artifacts. Which version of HF are you using?

--Rik

I have Version 4.01 and I used a Radius of 6 and Smothing of 4 on these images. I've been really impressed with the quality of stacks since version 4 came out. It has a much better interface and it seems a lot quicker, even with the 28MB tiff images from my D200.

Bye for now.

[salden]

Now that is a hairdo. Beautiful images and really great details.