Sweat bee

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

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dmillard
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Sweat bee

Post by dmillard »

Image

Nikon CF N Plan Achro 4/0.13, 40 images stacked in HF


This is the head (a little over 3mm between antennae tips) of Agapostemon texanus, a fairly common halictid bee here. The purple background is a transilluminated petal of the passionflower upon which it was feeding when I captured it. The image suffers a little from stacking artifacts - I'm still working on that aspect :?

rjlittlefield
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Post by rjlittlefield »

Looks pretty good from here! :D

What sorts of artifacts are bothering you?

--Rik

dmillard
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Post by dmillard »

rjlittlefield wrote:Looks pretty good from here! :D

What sorts of artifacts are bothering you?

--Rik
Thanks Rik -

I was able to remove a lot of halos around the perimeter of the head with PS, but can't address the internal ones very well. I think they contribute to an overall loss of resolution; e.g., I can see see clear branching of the setae in the individual image slices, but lose a lot of this detail in the stacked image.

David

nto
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Post by nto »

I find enjoyable image, perhaps find fault is higher background brightness antennas, antennas for better lighting would have better balanced final result, are only subtleties, image and beautiful!!
Antonio

dmillard
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Post by dmillard »

nto wrote:I find enjoyable image, perhaps find fault is higher background brightness antennas, antennas for better lighting would have better balanced final result, are only subtleties, image and beautiful!!
Thanks Antonio,

I agree - the backround does compete with the head. The image would have been improved if it had received about 1 stop less light, either by moving the backlight farther away, or masking it with a neutral gensity gel.

David

rjlittlefield
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Post by rjlittlefield »

dmillard wrote:...halos...
I wonder if you've tried TuFuse? Sometimes it has less trouble with halo than HF does.

--Rik

P_T
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Post by P_T »

The subject itself is nicely shot but I'm not sure about the colour of the background. It seems to clash with the green/blue of the head rather than complement it.

lauriek
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Post by lauriek »

Technically nice capture but somehow I don't like the entirely disembodied head look. Was the head actually detached? Stack looks fine to me at this size!

dmillard
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Post by dmillard »

rjlittlefield wrote:
dmillard wrote:...halos...
I wonder if you've tried TuFuse? Sometimes it has less trouble with halo than HF does.

--Rik
I agree Rik - TuFuse looks very attractive. However I doubt a version will be developed to run on a Mac. I either need to upgrade my Power Mac G5 to an Intel version so that I can run Windows on Parallels or BootCamp, or buy a machine that runs Windows native.
The subject itself is nicely shot but I'm not sure about the colour of the background. It seems to clash with the green/blue of the head rather than complement it.
You're right P_T, the idea was more attractive than the outcome.
Technically nice capture but somehow I don't like the entirely disembodied head look. Was the head actually detached?
Thanks Laurie. The detached head is a bit disconcerting; it brings to mind scenes from the French Revolution. The head accidentally became separated when I was attempting to position the bee in front of the lens, so I thought I would photograph it independently to see how it looked. This particular bee is so beautiful I think I'm going to make more attempts with another specimen.

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