Mayfly

[rjlittlefield]

Live mayfly, body length 7 mm.

Shot at f/8 on the aperture ring of an Olympus 80 mm bellows macro lens + matched 170 mm auxiliary lens, 1.75X onto the sensor of a Canon 300D camera, electronic flash.

Handheld stack of 7 frames, Zerene Stacker, no retouching of the subject.

Hope you enjoy!

--Rik

[Carl_Constantine]

That was a handheld stack?!?!?! ##### you got steady hands Rik.

Well done.

[rjlittlefield]

Hah! Every once in a while you get lucky...

It turns out that the beast shown above was getting ready to do its molt from dun to spinner, becoming fully adult.

Here is what it looked like a few minutes later.


Single shot, f/16 at 1:1 using Sigma 105 mm macro lens. After the molt, this thing is way too active to shoot a stack with my current equipment.

Comparing this picture with the earlier one, you can see that the row of "large" hairs along the trailing edge of the wings has apparently disappeared during the molt. I took a couple of higher resolution shots with the Oly on bellows, to see if this was completely true. Yep, sure enough, no hairs after the molt.

--Rik

[rjlittlefield]

That was a handheld stack?!?!?! you got steady hands Rik.

A lot of the trick is to "assume the position": prone, elbows on floor, one hand on floor cradling the front of the lens. I say "floor" because this mayfly's little life-changing experience took place on the floor of my breakfast nook.

Even so, the drift from first frame to last was over 10% of a frame width.

Alignment software is getting pretty good these days. Both Zerene and Helicon handle this with default parameters. CombineZP comes pretty close; there's just a bit of ghosting and smearing on the foreground legs and the wing hairs.

--Rik

[Cyberspider]

Very nice pictures Rik

Number 2 is great...also a very good stack!