Subject on pin question

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Simonl
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Location: Nottingham
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Subject on pin question

Post by Simonl »

Hello all, been reading through the forums - feel a bit out of my depth!
Took a few focus stacked images today of a dead fly. Attached it to a pin but struggling to "mount" it without the pin showing.

Image

Next photo I just cropped the pin out. Was wondering if there were any techniques anyone could share with regard to pin placement or equipment to
use to negate photoshop work or cropping.

Many thanks

SimonL

Image
Last edited by Simonl on Sun Feb 24, 2008 6:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Charles Krebs
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Post by Charles Krebs »

SimonL,

Welcome!

If the goal is to eliminate any retouching of a pin or other such support you can try mounting it so the subject is pinned to the background and the pin is completely hidden by the subject itself.

In some cases you can get by with the subject on a clear piece of glass... but that generally leads to battles with reflections off of the glass surface. (Although in some situations the reflections may prover easier to retouch out than a pin.

Your stacks look nice and "clean" with no obvious stacking artifacts.

rjlittlefield
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Post by rjlittlefield »

SimonL, welcome aboard! :D

Everybody struggles with mounting. There is no magic. There are a lot of techniques that people use. All of them have downsides to go with their upsides.

In general, it is very difficult to shoot an entire subject and not have the mounting hardware show at all in the original images. Most of the pictures you see in our forums and elsewhere either show part of a subject with the mount outside the frame, or the mount has been erased in post-processing.

Other than that...

1. Consider having no mount. Some specimens can simply be placed on an appropriate substrate and just sit there held down by only their own weight while you shoot the stack. See for example this carpet beetle and this jumping spider.

2. Consider placing the subject on a piece of glass. In this case, lighting of the entire environment must be carefully controlled to avoid reflections.

3. Consider placing the mount directly behind the specimen. Imagine a pin stuck in a blue card that serves as the background, with the pin pointing straight toward the camera and glued to the back side of the subject. See this caterpillar head capsule, and be sure to read both pages -- the setup is shown on the second page. Of course this technique requires choosing your pose very carefully beforehand, and even so it is often challenging to get the setup aligned just right.

4. Consider painting the mount to match the background. It's difficult to get the mount lighted exactly the same as the background, but retouching is simplified if you can get even close. When I reoriented the head capsule to take the second picture in a different pose, I used this trick.

Good question! I'll be interested to hear ideas what other people come up with. Again, welcome to the forums. :D

--Rik

PS. Dang, Charlie beat me to the "Submit" on this one, but what the heck, I'm hitting "Submit" too. :lol:

Simonl
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Joined: Fri Feb 22, 2008 5:06 am
Location: Nottingham
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Post by Simonl »

Thanks for the ideas - will have to put them into practice next time I have a spare afternoon.

Stunning caterpillar head by the way! Will be pleased if I can get anywhere close to this kind of quality.

Also loved the carpet beetle. Massive coincidence is that we've been finding these round the house recently and only today did I get round to taking some pics to indentify them (my first effort at doing a stack with my new setup - not even close to yours!)

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