bugs and spiders...episode 3

This time of the year pockets of eastern lubber grasshopper (Romalea microptera) crop up, they are thousands in a 2-3 yard area (2-3 meter close enough) acasionally 3 to 4 times larger area and numerous, they turn into a large 2 to 3 inch (6 to 8cm) yellow grasshopper by the summer.
Their bright color pattern is a warning to predators that the lubber contains toxic substances. There are several records attributing the demise of individual birds to failure to exercise caution when selecting prey items. Also small mammals such as opossums have been known to vomit violently after ingesting a lubber, and to remain ill for several hours.
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Edited by twb119 - 04 March 2008 at 19:46

Nice shooting jagged!

jagged wrote: I'd be interested to hear other people's views.

The stacking certainly worked well. I think the effect is fine, though the shallow DOF on macros can be used positively as well. I think it's the lighting on this particular shot that makes it a bit busy - the flash highlights and shadows.

When I've tried stacking before (manually in Photoshop), I found that the magnification changed with different focus points, so it was quite hard to match the different frames together. I'm not sure how lens-specific that is though - did you notice it with yours? Is that something that CombineZ takes care of?

This shot was stacked from 3 shots, if I remember correctly, taken with the plastic fantastic:


(Click on the image for larger version - didn't want to post it here because it's not a bug or spider part 3 :-))

Thanks dilettante and brettania for the rapid feedback!
Good point about the lighting, perhaps it was a bit harsh. I had tried bouncing it off some white paper for some other shots, but the location of the spider in this one made it impossible. I'll bear it in mind for future sessions.

@dilettante - There was a noticeable change in magnification with different focal points, but CombineZ handles that quite nicely. There is a macro (as in, sequence of commands) for performing a complete stack operation, and one of the first things it does is to align and rescale the component images. It all worked very smoothly, although I had to downsize/crop the source images prior to stacking otherwise my computer thrashed (I 'only' have 1GB RAM). I also removed some sharpening that CombineZ did by default, as it seemed a bit intense to me.

Some nice shots here.

Thomas - love your shots of the lubber Grasshoppers. 2nd one is my favourite. Nice colours, bokeh and composition and the image has alot of depth.

Jagged, i must say i agree about the sharpening in combinez, and very good idea to get rid of it. I am not sure what i am doing but i do an enterpolated output and a weighted average and it seems ok.

I just got a new microscope lens for 27USD and this is the result...



tim

I wonder if mine was from the same species of spider as polyglot's. This spider was about 3cm to 4cm in length.