The species is Callibaetus ferrugineus. During the summer, I can pick up several of these off of my porch in the morning if the lights are left on. These are very small mayflies, with a wing span that would not quite cover your thumbnail. Only a close up inspection reveals how strange they are. This one is a male. The crazy upper compound eyes are thought to be used to look for flying females.
Minnow Mayfly by Mark Sturtevant, on Flickr
And here is the female. They look ordinary (although even "ordinary" is pretty weird for mayflies).
Minnow mayfly by Mark Sturtevant, on Flickr
So if you see tiny mayflies, look closely!
The pictures were made as manual focus stacks with the Venus/Laowa 2.5-5X lens. Merged in Zerene, run thru Topaz Sharpen AI, and then fiddled with some more in Gimp.
More mayfly weirdness
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- MarkSturtevant
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More mayfly weirdness
Mark Sturtevant
Dept. of Still Waters
Dept. of Still Waters
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Re: More mayfly weirdness
very nice images, impressive hand held stack.
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Re: More mayfly weirdness
They are just cool subjects and you did a great job with them especially hand held. The whole male eyes situation is just ridiculous. LOL!
- MarkSturtevant
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Re: More mayfly weirdness
Thanks everyone. I want to clarify by 'manual focus stacks' what I mean is that the camera is resting on a table, and I carefully nudge it forward for different pictures. The trick is to try to align the central reticle to the same spot each time. I can get 3-5 good frames that way. But I repeat several times to be sure. To me, hand-held would be to hold the camera off of a surface. I do that too at times, by resting the camera on one hand or one fist. But I don't think I did that here.
I am interested in coming up with a better way of doing this sort of thing, but I don't want automated systems, since I want to be free to do this in the dirt, and to quickly move to different positions on the fly. Also in-camera focus bracketing would be great, but this marvelous super macro lens is fully manual.
So maybe a sliding rail of some kind? I've notice that drawers have these ball bearing sliding rails that seem real smooth. So maybe ...
I am interested in coming up with a better way of doing this sort of thing, but I don't want automated systems, since I want to be free to do this in the dirt, and to quickly move to different positions on the fly. Also in-camera focus bracketing would be great, but this marvelous super macro lens is fully manual.
So maybe a sliding rail of some kind? I've notice that drawers have these ball bearing sliding rails that seem real smooth. So maybe ...
Mark Sturtevant
Dept. of Still Waters
Dept. of Still Waters
Re: More mayfly weirdness
I have a nice collection of those drawer sliders....I think they have potential. They do make a good "idler rail".
- MarkSturtevant
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- Location: Michigan, U.S.A.
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Re: More mayfly weirdness
No idea what that is. But there is this person named Allan Wells who has a ton of macrophotography videos on YouTube. In one of them he gets into building a manual sort of rail (although I don't think he never shows it working!), and he does mention that a Manfrotto sliding rail fits perfectly inside one of those sliding drawer rails. So that reminded me that I had actually set aside a drawer rail with this same idea in mind ... and it's around here somewhere...
Mark Sturtevant
Dept. of Still Waters
Dept. of Still Waters