Beetle with Electric Antennae

beetleman · Post by **beetleman** » Fri May 30, 2008 6:19 am

I had no idea the antennae would come out looking like this. They look translucent and glowing. I am guessing it is some kind of leaf beetle. The elytra are a metallic green, head & thorax black and the antennae were about half the length of the body. A little bit too much halo in the stack.

ISO100, F/10, 4 sec, 400D, 68mm of Kinko tubes, Canon 100mm macro & reversed 50mm. Stack of 74 shots with HF.

Mike B in OKlahoma · Post by **Mike B in OKlahoma** » Fri May 30, 2008 7:34 pm

Wow, he can rock down to Electric Avenue, can't he?! Very good find!

Roy Patience · Post by **Roy Patience** » Mon Jun 02, 2008 12:53 am

Doug,

Another really interesting stack. I like the perspective on this one.

I can't remember if you have described your setup. How do you move your subject or camera.

Roy

Harold Gough · Post by **Harold Gough** » Mon Jun 02, 2008 1:39 am

The effect is also present around the right eye and the setae posterior to it. It is reminiscent of phase contrast illumination.

Harold

acerola · Post by **acerola** » Mon Jun 02, 2008 2:57 am

I think some of the translucency came from that the software cannot decide between the details of the antenna and the details of the body behind the antenna. So it shows you both of the details in one place. If you want to get rid of the background details, you can create a shorter stack just from the antenna. And you can use photoshop to mask it to the original image.

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Mon Jun 02, 2008 9:10 am

Doug, when you say "glowing", are you referring to the fact that the neutral gray/black of the beetle appears brighter with a tinge of tan in the vicinity of the antennae? (This is especially obvious on the right-hand side.)

If so, then what you're seeing really is a lot like "glow", in that light from the antenna is getting physically mixed with light from the body. This happens when the lens is focused on the body and the antenna is a very fuzzy OOF blob in the far foreground. Essentially, the body is being seen by only part of the lens, around the antenna, while the rest of the lens sees the antenna itself. The light that gets to a pixel comes partly from the well-focused body, and partly from the OOF antenna.

This effect is not a software glitch. If you study the individual frames, you'll see the same thing there. But in the individual frames, the effect is not confusing because your brain just says "Oh yeah, that's just a very OOF antenna getting in the way when I'm focused on the body." Confusion sets in only when the software shows you a well-focused image of the antenna in addition to its OOF contribution to the body behind it.

This photo also shows rather sharp small dark halos around the antennae and especially around the setae under the eye at right (beetle's left). Those are software glitches, and they have a very different cause. What happens there is that the software makes a sudden shift between choosing pixels from frames where the antenna or setae are sharply focused, and choosing pixels from a far away frame where the overall brightness was significantly different. No individual frame will show these halos; they are produced by the software when the stack is put together. One of the advantages of the "pyramid" algorithm used by TuFuse is that it produces a lot less halo than single-resolution algorithms used by most of the other software.

--Rik

beetleman · Post by **beetleman** » Mon Jun 02, 2008 11:12 am

I wish I still had the specimen. I was trying to blow some dust off of it (canned air) and it went flying somewere that I cannot recover it. I would have liked to check and see if the antennae were translucent. I think the light is shining into the interior and showing connective tissue.

RIK: Thanks for the explanation for what is going on in the stack. I tried this specimen stack three times and glow around that same antenna was bad in all cases. This was the best stack. Then I blew the beetle away

. The thing that is stopping me from trying TuFuse, is the command line stuff (which is way over my head) I noticed there is a beta TuFuse pro with GUI. Are you using that version?

Roy: Right now I am using a Velbon Super Mag Slider Macro Rail attached to an Oak plank to move the camera and a "helping Hands" thing that has two "Alligator clips" to hold and minipulate the specimen.
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/control ... 311&is=REG
http://www.apogeekits.com/images/hands.jpg
I am using two lights for lighting with makeshift defussers (paper-tissue) and a white paper tube over the end of the reversed 50mm

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Mon Jun 02, 2008 11:27 am

beetleman wrote:The thing that is stopping me from trying TuFuse, is the command line stuff (which is way over my head) I noticed there is a beta TuFuse pro with GUI. Are you using that version?

I bounce back and forth between using the TuFuse Pro GUI and command line invocation. The GUI offers some additional controls beyond the command line version, or at least beyond what are documented for the command line. I have to confess that I don't use any of those, so for me the choice of GUI vs command line is essentially random. I do, however, use the command line version that's distributed with the GUI, since I've gotten some hints that that version includes a few algorithm improvements over the free command line version.

At this point, you might consider trying out Alan Hadley's new CombineZP software, which he released over the weekend. See http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/combinez/message/734 . I haven't had a chance to play with this released version, but earlier versions that Alan slipped me for testing looked quite encouraging. The "P" on the end stands for "pyramid". What's under the hood is Alan's own variation of the family of algorithms that also spawned TuFuse.

--Rik

Charles Krebs · Post by **Charles Krebs** » Tue Jun 03, 2008 11:11 pm

Doug,

Nice to see you putting up some good looking "stacked" images lately.

The TuFuse GUI is extremely simple to use, and very modestly priced. If you use CombineZ to align the stack first, the entire procedure is pretty "painless"

. (If you have any questions about saving the aligned "rectangles" from CombineZ just ask... it's also very simple to do, but not entirely obvious at first glance).

As Rik mentioned, CombineZP is worth checking out as well. One neat thing is that you have a choice of clicking a single "button" and it will run the stack using all 6 "methods" at it's disposal. This really helps to get a "feel" for the results obtainable, and where one method may work better depending on the source images. There is also a much less "intimidating" (basic) tool-bar interface that I think many users will like better, especially if the program is relatively new to them.