An introduction and some micrographs

Images taken in a controlled environment or with a posed subject. All subject types.

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worm
Posts: 22
Joined: Tue Aug 17, 2021 9:38 am

An introduction and some micrographs

Post by worm »

Hello all!
I'm a grad student in spatial ecology that got into field macro photography about a year ago as a way to learn entomology , which has become a minor focus of my graduate work. My work primarily focuses on understanding invasion as a global biological process and I'm currently trying to characterize how different insect taxa move around the world in global trade. About 6 months ago I found this forum and began working on my studio stacking rig. I have things finalized enough now to say hello to the forum and share a few of my first images. Thanks particularly to Beatsy for his images of his dome lighting setup - I've been incorporating a lot of your ideas on swing-down dome diffusers.

Calocera cornea
4x Amscope objective
Nikon Bellows
Panasonic G95


looks like I'm losing quite a bit of sharpness when rescaling for this forum - I'll try to improve my procedure
Attachments
calcera_04.jpg

worm
Posts: 22
Joined: Tue Aug 17, 2021 9:38 am

Re: An introduction and some micrographs

Post by worm »

Unidentified Cribraria sp.

same as above with Edmund optics flavor Nikon 10x finite
cribaria_01.jpg

MarkSturtevant
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Re: An introduction and some micrographs

Post by MarkSturtevant »

Very interesting! A way to post pictures here is to put them on a photo sharing site (Flickr is good), and to then use the Share tool in there to post here. The pictures can then be enlarged if a viewer wishes.
Mark Sturtevant
Dept. of Still Waters

rjlittlefield
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Re: An introduction and some micrographs

Post by rjlittlefield »

Welcome aboard! Your studio stacking seems to be coming along very well!
worm wrote:
Fri Nov 04, 2022 8:40 am
looks like I'm losing quite a bit of sharpness when rescaling for this forum - I'll try to improve my procedure
The most important thing is to be aware of the issue and sharpen appropriately after resizing.

If you're using Photoshop then sometimes a good amount of sharpening is provided just by selecting Bicubic Sharper as the resizing method. But usually I like the result better if I "sharpen to taste" using the Unsharp Mask filter with a small kernel, typically something like 30% at 0.7 pixels.

If your subject has repeating patterns of a troublesome size, like often happens in compound eyes, then appearance of moiré patterns by aliasing can be a problem. See https://www.photomacrography.net/forum/ ... hp?t=19456 for a thread about how to attack that.

One other source of unsharpness can be the browser used for viewing, especially if the operating system display scale is set to anything other than an integer scaling factor. For example I usually run my own high-dpi displays at a scaling factor of 1.75 because that makes text be a size that I generally like. But this has the side effect of causing browsers to do subpixel interpolation, which always introduces some sharpness issues. Whenever I want to see an image at its original sharpness, I have to pull the image into some photo viewing tool like Photoshop that ignores the system setting and will display pixels exactly as they appear in the file, or zoomed to some integral scale factor such as 200%.

I hope this helps!

--Rik

Lou Jost
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Re: An introduction and some micrographs

Post by Lou Jost »

Really nice images, congratulations!

worm
Posts: 22
Joined: Tue Aug 17, 2021 9:38 am

Re: An introduction and some micrographs

Post by worm »

Thank you for the kind words. I couldn't have ever gotten this far without such a rich archive of helpful information here.

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