You can see that the butterfly has a stray scale that is attached to its antennae!
I have a 12"x30" print of this arriving today for my office at work!

Moderators: Pau, rjlittlefield, ChrisR, Chris S.
Here are the two shots I used...1of1snowflakes wrote:I took this image with my Olympus EM1 mark 2, 60mm Olympus macro lens and two Raynox 250s combined. I took one of the front of the butterfly with antennae visible, and one of the main portion of the wing with the back orange pattern visible. I then stitched two images together to make the panoramic. For all the shots, the butterfly did not move a bit. Each shot that was stitched together was a focus bracketed shot of 70+ images to get the one combined image. I shot at f5.6, iso100, with a Godox speedlight flash.
You can see that the butterfly has a stray scale that is attached to its antennae!
I have a 12"x30" print of this arriving today for my office at work!
aveslux wrote:It's beautiful but can we the see the high res finished product somewhere?
Absolutely lovely, the lighting for butterflies under flash is hard to get right and look natural.1of1snowflakes wrote:aveslux wrote:It's beautiful but can we the see the high res finished product somewhere?
Let's see if this works:
https://flic.kr/p/2herT32
I agree, sad thing is I do not have Photoshop and don't have any training in how to do that....I do have Lightroom but I dont think I can do anything about it there, can I?aveslux wrote:Absolutely lovely, the lighting for butterflies under flash is hard to get right and look natural.1of1snowflakes wrote:aveslux wrote:It's beautiful but can we the see the high res finished product somewhere?
Let's see if this works:
https://flic.kr/p/2herT32
It's one of those photos where the detail on the scales and such is so fine and they are slightly translucent so the quality and detail only really comes out when viewed close or large. It almost looks out of focus when viewed small.
But you might want to clean up your stack a little around the antennae as there is a bit of ghosting from them moving slightly between exposures.
Otherwise incredible work
aveslux wrote:You should use Helicon for your stacks, it allows retouching of the stack so you can override the algorithm with a brush (painting in the area from the right shot you want) in places like that.
https://www.heliconsoft.com/heliconsoft ... con-focus/
It works nicely.
Did you download and inspect the full size image at 100%?Pau wrote:It works nicely.
Now I can better see an issue with your otherwise excellent image:
Some parts like the legs and antennae are very sharp while the wing and even more towards its distal part is somewhat unsharp and fuzzy.
I think that this is due to movement and the more likely culprit would be the flash itself.
This is an effect several times discussed that can be due either to the thermal expansion of the air close to the flashgun generating an expansive wave or due the thermal expansion of the air close to the subject that is instantaneously heated by the energy of the light pulse.
Of course, being image stacks, it also could be due to vibrations generated by the camera or more likely by the environment. Carefully checking the source files could help to isolate the cause
Umm..now I see that this is placed at the Nature forum, so the subject must be alive...another possible source of movement, of course
The full size image looks clean to me, no indication of motion problems. In the rear tile alone there are echoes with one antenna, but that does not appear in the assembled pano.aveslux wrote:Did you download and inspect the full size image at 100%?
I agree. As noted by aveslux, the downsizing makes them look out of focus. I've had this happen even with studio work using dead specimens and continuous illumination.I think some of the reason is the detail being captured, at full res you can see so much that I just don't think the resizing down algorithms do the photo justice with the nature of the scales and the translucency.
Yes, I am not sure what is being seen. Here's a crop of the middle of the wing just in-case anyone is curious...it is dark, but I do not see any difference in sharpness.rjlittlefield wrote:The full size image looks clean to me, no indication of motion problems. In the rear tile alone there are echoes with one antenna, but that does not appear in the assembled pano.aveslux wrote:Did you download and inspect the full size image at 100%?
I agree. As noted by aveslux, the downsizing makes them look out of focus. I've had this happen even with studio work using dead specimens and continuous illumination.I think some of the reason is the detail being captured, at full res you can see so much that I just don't think the resizing down algorithms do the photo justice with the nature of the scales and the translucency.
--Rik
1of1snowflakes wrote:Yes, I am not sure what is being seen. Here's a crop of the middle of the wing just in-case anyone is curious...it is dark, but I do not see any difference in sharpness.rjlittlefield wrote:The full size image looks clean to me, no indication of motion problems. In the rear tile alone there are echoes with one antenna, but that does not appear in the assembled pano.aveslux wrote:Did you download and inspect the full size image at 100%?
I agree. As noted by aveslux, the downsizing makes them look out of focus. I've had this happen even with studio work using dead specimens and continuous illumination.I think some of the reason is the detail being captured, at full res you can see so much that I just don't think the resizing down algorithms do the photo justice with the nature of the scales and the translucency.
--Rik
The difficultly with this is that it was a live stack and it's very rare to get two 70+ focus bracketed sessions so clean without the insect (especially a butterfly) moving.
Can anyone tell where I spliced them together??
Working from a full resolution download from https://flic.kr/p/2herT32 ...1of1snowflakes wrote:Can anyone tell where I spliced them together??