Crossocerus with DMap psychedelica

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RBack
Posts: 6
Joined: Sun Jan 11, 2015 4:37 am

Crossocerus with DMap psychedelica

Post by RBack »

Not sure if this is the proper forum for this - but here I go...

I mostly - or almost only - use macro photography and stacking for documentation of collected invertebrates. I seldom attempt to create perfect photos in terms of composition, colour or such.
The purpose of the photos are to be able to determine species and therefore they are primarily very basic or depicting certain important, specific details.
Mostly the objects (critters) are rather dusty as well. So cleaning the insects and cleaning in post editing is time consuming.
I just remove the worst piles of garbage. Tom me this is more of entomology rather than photography.
Funny in a way - since I'm actually working as an artist (Fine Arts) and teacher in a Fine Arts academy.

Anyway.

The other day I was documenting a male Crossocerus subulatus. The first image is a typical dorsal view with my normal diffused light.

Image

However these males have a bluish tone that somehow resembles interference colours - but which perhaps are not. Normally interference colours gets stronger and clearer with light diffusion.
The bluish tint of this one disappeared with diffusion. So I took a shallower batch of images without diffusion just to have some documentation of those blue (and obviously green) colours as well.

Image

Then I got the idea to attach my full spectrum camera (removed UV/IR filter) just for fun. It was late and I was starting to get a bit tired.
I took another shallow batch of photos just to cover the area with colour reflections but happened to forget the camera on automatic light metering and thus it produced some images with slightly different exposures.
The PMax got grainy and the DMap produced a lovely pattern. Well, nothing new about this image and these DMap artifacts - but gotta love them anyhow.

Image

However I quickly made a retouched boring version as well. Not really anything interesting about the outcome of the image apart from the metasoma showing some reddish tone compared to the mesosoma.

Image

Think I should get my self a UV lamp and experiment some more. Some of these insects might very well have UV reflections.

rjlittlefield
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Post by rjlittlefield »

Hah! I think those are the trippiest DMap halos that I've ever seen!

And I've seen a lot of 'em, being the fellow who answers Zerene Stacker support requests. :)

--Rik

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