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Macro Photography of Beetles - Part 1

As the project About page says, I had volunteered to photograph some local beetles for a Native Orchid wasp propagator study we where doing.  Some native wasps lay their larvae in beetles that live underground.  Our mission is to try and identify the species of wasp that is parasitising local beetles and to identify what kind of beetle it is. 

In November, I was given the first vial of beetles that had been collected after dusk.

Beetle Vials

I knew my Canon Powershot A200IS camera doesn't take good macro photos using the built in flash, and that photographing beetles using natural light would mean I would end up with a shadow.  So straight up I thought I would try building a quick reflecting device to see how well I could get around the problem.  One summer afternoon, I constructed a paper concave reflector, mounted onto graph paper:

Testing out a Sun reflector

 As you can see it did work a bit, but not good enough.  I needed some kind of light box to surround the beetle.  That's when I remembered that I had purchased a cheap length of flexible array of LEDs.  It didn't take long out in the shed to build a concept rig out of scrap wood and some coat hanger wire to test out my hypothesis:

Inital Testing of the LED Array

Now all I had to do was build an enclosure so I could control the light level reaching the object.

Here is a sample shot of a common house fly that was found on the shed window sill.  The graph paper is the standard 2mm grid.  On my 24" LCD monitor the grid comes out at around 65mm across.  That works out to be a magnification of over 32 times.  It's amazing the extra detail you can see on an object.

House Fly

Yes, I need to play around with the aperture and speed, so as to get the lighting and white balance correct.  The above photo is a bit dark and too blue.  I have also started on a camera mount that will fit above the light ring, so every photo will be in standardised.

I had remembered reading a bit about a technique called focus stacking.  Reading a few other reviews around the Internet, I settled on trialling the CombineZP software package.

 

Read on for Part 2 of the project