Termite ventral shot

[Graham46]

Reticulitermes flavipes. 65mm MPE at 3x. ISO 160, 1/80 @ f/5. Macro twinlite at 1/8 power. 18 frames stacked in ZS using Pmax. Questions and comments welcome


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Graham

[morfa]

I like it Graham! I think the black background is great with this subject and the lighting is excellent. Only complaint is I'd like to see a higher resolution version ;-)
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John Hallmén
http://www.flickr.com/johnhallmen

[Graham46]

John,

I will gladly oblige you with that when I get back to work on monday. Where I live there is an expected 2 feet of snow on the way, so I will be home all weekend probably... but when I get back to work and retrieve the high res file, I will put it on my flickr and link it here. I use a 5D mark ii, so there is resolution galore!
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Graham

[Graham46]

John--

I thought there was a way to make a picture unlisted, but still viewable with a direct link you could send someone on flickr, but apparently thats not the case, so I wont be posting a high res version of this picture anywhere. Its really not that good at 100% anyway due to the magnification it was shot at, and the lack of retouching in ZS. Ive found that if you really wanna make a picture sharp, using the retouching tool to brush in areas from single frames eliminates any fuzziness or halos that are produced in the stack as a whole. If Rik saw this comment Im sure he would agree.
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Graham

[rjlittlefield]

No disagreement from me -- things always get better when you stick a skilled human in the loop.

I'm curious, though, if there's some intermediate resolution that less than the camera's full 21 MP, more than the 0.42 MP we see here, and still looks good? Something perhaps in the 2-6 MP range?

--Rik

[morfa]

Thanks Graham, for remembering my request!

[Graham46]

John--

I thought I tried that and then logged out and went to the link and it took me back to the login page. Let me see if I can figure out what you mean, and then I will post the link here.
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Graham

[Graham46]

Ok, at first I could not figure it out, but by right clicking on the image and viewing properties, it provides a funky link that doesnt look like the rest of the ones for normal flickr browsing. Here it is:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2726/4342923679_115382a210_o.jpg
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Graham

[rjlittlefield]

Graham, the 2400x3600 pixel version looks great. Your standards are obviously very high!

I see the usual "glowing" effect near foreground/background overlaps, but those are always present because no source frame has a clear view. Other than that, it looks clean. I assume you did some cleanup on the background?

--Rik

[Peter M. Macdonald]

Graham,

The full resolution version looks very nice at 100% view. But if you drop it to 50% it is absolutely lovely. 50% view gives a much better approximation of how it would look if printed out. Guess that we are all too critical of our own results at actual pixel level.

Peter

[rjlittlefield]

It's probably worth mentioning again...

If an image looks sharp at 100% pixels, then almost certainly information has been lost or degraded at some places due to unfortunate alignment of subject features and pixel locations.

The only way to accurately capture everything that's in the optical image is to oversample, in which case the view at 100% pixels will always look blurred.

We're so used to wanting presentation images that look sharp, it's often hard to remember that a blurred high resolution master can be a good sign!

--Rik

[Graham46]

Thank you both for your kind comments. Yes, its true, I am very critical of my work Sometimes If I see an image I really like, I will take the time to use the retouching in ZS to make every part look as sharp as possible. In this image, I just took the original output and did my standard photoshopping to it, which consists of auto contrast, curves, unsharp mask, a touch of saturation, and removing the mounting pin with the clone stamp.
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Graham