Beatsy wrote:Sadly, the hard, black parts of the ladybird (i.e. most of it) exhibit the same behaviour as your jewelled wasps Rik. That is, they "exhibit" nothing at all under crossed polars - just pitch black
Did you try turning the polarizer on the camera to make the polarizers not perfectly crossed? That should restore some of the specular reflection, hopefully enough to make the legs visible again. Or maybe you need to add some unpolarized diffuse illumination, just so that everything gets lit up to some extent.
BTW, just from your description I would not characterize the behavior as being same as the jewel wasp.
The bizarre thing about the jewel wasp is that they have a lot of reflections that do not
look specular -- for example all the stuff that is brilliantly colored despite white illumination -- and yet they still go black under crossed polars.
Your situation with the ladybird sounds like it's just opaque black stuff, where the only thing you ever see is surface reflections, and surface reflections will almost certainly get killed by crossed polars.
The reason I say "almost certainly" is that some textures can give multi-bounce surface reflections that are not blocked by crossed polars. See
http://www.photomacrography.net/forum/v ... hp?t=33842 for an artificial setup and explanation.
--Rik