Macro-photography

Sam, if you're interested - or becoming interested - in 3D Stereo, you might want to browse this site.

This is not a competitor. Just asking if anyone can put a name to it. Ruler in mm

. Attempted suicide in a bucket of water. It had a sting (Untested).

The bee was as black as a crow.

Dozens of these emerged from our pocket handkerchief sized "lawn" this morning. I've no idea what they are - about 8mm from nose to tail.

Nikon D90, Sigma 50mm Macro lens and 12mmextension tube.

Stay well,

Rod

Roderick,

Cockchafer beetle adult.

The larvae live in the soil, eating your grass roots.https://www.bing.com/search?

https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/wildlife-guides/other-garden-wildlife/insects-and-other-invertebrates/beetles-and-bugs/cockchafer/

First one is Carpenter bee.

Edited By Roger Provins 2 on 25/05/2020 18:44:09

Hi Grizzly,

The bug is much smaller than a cockchafer or a summer chafer - less than half an inch in length. It looks similar to a cockchafer but in miniature.

Rod

A Garden Chafer?

Neil

Hi Rod, might be a "Harpalus Affinis" when compared to the bugs in my Collins British insect book.

Ed.

An experiment in making model split big-end bearings for a twin marine engine and a couple of insects from the garden. More insects in the album. The bearings are Ø5.0mm ID.

Ed.

No great merit in this, but I thought it might encourage people to take a closer look at the commonplace.

I'm working on a large Russian microscope, and this was just a test shot:

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Excuse the colour-fringes please ... There is still some investigation to do.

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It's from an ink-jet print on white paper ... part of a 1.8mm high letter B

MichaelG.

Roderick,

Looks like Ed & Neil have got it sorted.

Roger,

Thanks for the bee I.D

Bear..

Jack, Thanks for posting your macro shots here. Enjoyed looking at those tiny chicks.

Michael, your pictures are all fascinating. Great you can magnify thing much better than the rest of us. I'm at awe the details we can't see with our naked eyes. Keep sharing your work here.

Bill, great close up macro. Is that corrosion in your taps or just work debris? Are you still putting extension tubes on your 150mm Macro? Very nice! Are you using off-camera flash or this is all natural light? Keep posting your pics.

Edited By Raphael Golez on 25/05/2020 21:01:50

Baer, thanks for sharing your pictures here. Never seen that type of bee before. Roger, thanks for the ID. I remember a species of carpenter bee back home in the Philippines. It is huge and yellow in colour. It bores holes in dead wood. I don't know how they do it though.

Rod, great capture there. Thanks for sharing your macros. Keep it coming.

Ed, great details on your machining. These macro lens opens up a lot of fine detail that we can appreciate. Nice capture on the winged insects.

Michael , keep the high magnification pictures coming.

Enjoyed all the work and discussion here.

BW

Raphael

Garden Chafer looks correct. Thanks. Here's another pic from this morning. The beetles don't look as shiny as in the references but I suspect this is because:

a) they've only just emerged

b) we have very sandy soil

Stay well,

Rod

P.S. we saw our first Green Hairstreak butterfly yesterday so that's 2 new insects in 2 days

Cheer Raphael, I don't think I've ever used the 1mm one, it just came as part of a very cheap set 35+ years ago, and has probably got a touch of surface rust. Clearly it's quite poor quality, but the dies that came with it have been used for some 1.2mm & 2mm screws I've made to repair a spotting scope.
The 10BA one looks like it's been badly stored in the past, as the shank is unreadable, but that was clearly used before I bought the set second hand as the business end was still full of tapping fluid.

The camera is micro 4/3 but the 150mm Sigma macro lens is normal 4/3s so needs an adaptor to work OK with the newer camera.
The 4/3s standard only allows the use of one accessory at a time, so you can use a teleconverter or an extension tube, but not both at the same time, which is a pain.
It's possible to fiddle things a bit more with micro 4/3, so these last two photos were taken with a combination.
First the camera body, then 10mm + 16mm extension tubes, then the 4/3s to micro 4/3s converter, followed by a 4/3s 25mm extension tube, and lastly the 150mm Sigma.
The lens itself goes up to 1:1 and then a further 51mm of extension tubes, so not sure what final magnification it ends up.
I did try the same setup using the 4/3s 50mm macro, but the focus point was only about 10mm in front of the lens; the 150mm Sigma gives a better working distance.

One clever facility of this Olympus body, is that it allows "in camera" stacking of up to 15 images, each with a slightly different focus point. (It also allows auto stacking of 99 shots, but that one needs to be stacked in an external program.
Unfortunately, with the Sigma lens being non-Olympus, this facility is disabled, hence using F11 for the last two shots.

I do have a later Micro 4/3s Olympus 60mm macro which I used with the pair of extensions in the previous photos.
That allows stacking fine.

All photos were in natural light in the conservatory.
It was more of a problem with the recently uploaded album of Milling Cutter Chucks, I mentioned in another thread I originated a couple of days ago. The lighting angles caused too many highlights. Drawing the blinds didn't help as there was too much light coming through the plastic roof. Arguably I might have been better with a ring flash, or a home made LED ring light I made years ago, before these new halo lights arrived on the scene.

I don't claim to be experienced in macro photography at all, though i do take shots every now and then; it was your initial post that prompted me to have a play, so thanks for the prod with a sharp stick.

Bill

This picture has little merit in itself. It’s more about the way and with what it was taken.

If I’m alert to their demise, I tend to rescue the few flying insects that have fallen into the birdbath. There has been the occasional bee struggling for her life and for which I see no threat. With their unpredictable nature however, wasps lose out. The ladybird presented no such threat that I was aware of.

While it sat on my finger as a drying-out option, it was also a good opportunity for my wife to grab the relatively new Sony-HDR-CX405 Handycam. The camera specification boasts a 30x optical zoom and a digital zoom (extension) of unmentionable range.

Here was a unique occasion to test the zoom.

Unfortunately, in the brilliant Australian sunshine, it was almost impossible to see the image in the LCD. Focus was supposed to be both automatic and manual, although I can only recall being unable to stop the camera from grabbing a sharp image of the brick wall in the background. It should also have been easy to operate the camera with one hand while my other hand was preoccupied. It wasn’t.

Struggling to keep the insect in frame while the camera preferred to focus on the background, in my haste to get the picture, I couldn’t remember which button to press or where it was on the camera. It took a smart woman to come to my rescue and between us … Success!

There have been other specimens to survive the birdbath experience, but this will do for now.

Sam

Edited By Sam Stones on 26/05/2020 02:16:31

I forgot to mention ...

Thank you Bandersnatch for the '3DStereo.com' **LINK**

Nick, I can offer no extra help, but after years of on/off practice, I can squint and grab the images in seconds.

It must be a special gift ... well not really.

To everyone ... 'Good luck, and keep safe'.

Sam

To Mr and Mrs Stones ... and the wizards at Sony

My greatest admiration and respect.

MichaelG.

My claim for the smallest object so far. The 3 curly gentlemen going about their lawful occasions here are Spirochaete Bacteria, taken with an oil immersion apochromat.

1200x magnification is approaching the limit of optical imagery because objects are becoming large in terms of the wavelength of light. Even the very best lens struggle and really big magnifications dump light microscopy in favour of an electron beam. So beware of taking fine details in images like this too literally - they may be optical aberrations rather than biological structure. Particularly when the photo was taken on an inexpensive microscope!

Syphilis is the best known Spirochaete. No idea what these guys are, they came from a Hay Infusion, not an STD I picked up off a toilet seat. A Hay Infusion is posh microscopy-speak for bunging a handful of grass into a jam-jar half-full of water and watching it decompose over several weeks! Bacteria appear first, then an entire eco-system of larger animalcules until pollution kills the whole lot. Disintegrating vegetable matter is interesting too.

Dave

Very impressive, Dave ... nicely done !!

MichaelG.

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Edit:

Couldn’t resist the visual similarity to Astro images

’All aboard for the Spirochæte Galaxy’

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 26/05/2020 09:35:59