The Mantis Revisited

Shown two already a while back, but there were a few more I never showed here, so here's all of them...

I did want to capture another quite surprising detail of these creatures, but I haven't seen one around lately.

The inside of the front legs have a colored patch, a very bright reflective blue, green and yellow, something you wouldn't expect on an insect that's completely brown. The mantis is probably mimicking a flower with it when she opens up those front legs, mesmerising some unsuspecting insect... 'oooh, pretty'... right before it's staked and eaten alive...

But as you can see on these photos, the legs are firmly shut. I saw the coloring only later, when I didn't have the camera close by...

Yes, those legs are mine...

Praying mantis, crawling from behind a bench... one more time...
Click on the photo for the big version...

Well hello there gorgeous...

Praying mantis, crawling from behind a bench... To my surprise they're actually smaller than pictures like these had me believe... Their 180 degrees rotating head is quite amazing, and I could get it to look at me by softly blowing in its directing... Usually you see the green version, but I didn't have a choice, this one was brown... Had to use flash though, it was wobbling in a somewhat dark corner...

Look at the spikes on its front legs, I wouldn't want to be another insect caught in those big eyes, they are ferocious. And a well known fact: the female chews up the male during copulation... She doesn't even wait till the pleasure moment: usually she starts nibbling on his head half way, the poor sod... Talk about one night stands...

Click on the photo for the big version if you dare...

Into the sunset...

Stacked from 30 photos...
Click on it for the big version...

Charlie

Meet Charlie, Charlie the beetle...

Charles officially, but friends call him Charlie.

He's dead, sorry to say.

I found him behind the curtains, which explains the fact that he's a bit dusty.

I needed something to further test my automated focusing software.

Charlie seemed like a good subject, only a centimeter tall, high on his dried out legs and an ok name, although I named him myself.

In fact, he might be a Charlene, or a Charlotte, who's to say...

So me and Charlie or Charlotte or Charlene were messing around a bit, until I was finished, stacked 24 photos of him, and zoomed in on his dead head.

I must warn you... it's not pretty...

It got me a bit nauseous...

As far as close up insect shots go, this is probably one of the worst ever, but at least my software got the job done.

Stacked from 24 photos, meet Charlie, Charlie the dusty, dead and dried out beetle.

Click on the photos for the bigger version, but don't hold me responsible for the consequences...

Charlie... stacked from 24 photos...

Charlie close up...
Click on the photos for the big version, but be aware: can cause stomach cramps...

Stacking II

Well, intrigued by this focus stacking business, I figured out quite quickly that the big difficulty is actually changing the focus in between shots.

You can do it manually, by twisting the ring, or most likely by shifting the camera, or probably also by shifting the subject. But unless you have some kind of rig that can be shifted precise and by minute amounts - to shift either the camera or the subject - it's not gonna work flawlessly. At least not with me twisting that focus ring and my crappy tripod.

Then I figured out that Canon has a software development kit for their EOS cameras, and I thought: what if you could let the computer drive the focus, small steps at a time and in between take a picture?

Turns out that SDK of Canon had exactly the right functions to do that, so I wrote myself a little application. It shifts the focus by a certain amount and then takes a picture. You can tell the computer how much to focus, in what direction to focus and how many pictures it has to take.

Works pretty well if I say so myself, and the big advantage: I don't have to touch that ring anymore.

The application is a bit rudimentary, and I still need to figure out the focus distances between the different options Canon gives me.

There's basically 3 types of focus drive: minute steps, bigger steps, quite big steps. Either closer up or further away. But I'm pretty sure they relate to one another. Question is: how many minute ones fit into one bigger one, because knowing that allows for more control if the bigger steps are too big and the small steps lead to way too many pictures.

Here's a picture truly not worth the effort (although this stuff goes pretty well with caviar, I assure you), but the proof is in the pudding (or something like that), so I took a crazy 100 photos and stacked those into 1...

Anyone interested in the software: I'll most likely have some kind of version worthy of distributing very soon. It's specifically for EOS cameras with Liveview capabilities (that's essential, else the focus won't drive). Tested on Windows 7 with a 5D Mark II...

Note though for those not grasping this fully or reading it half: it's not stacking software. It's 'automated focusing & picture taking' software. For the actual stacking of the resulting photos you need other software.

First of the 100...

Last of the 100...

All 100 combined...
Click on the photos for the larger version...

Stacking

I've been taking photos with a 'real' camera now for a few years. And looking back I can see improvement. Can't believe the photos I kept in the beginning that I would now throw away in an instant, so I also became a lot more critical. But fact remains, I'm still learning, and despite other people sometimes liking them, I feel I should do better.

By now I know a lot of the technical aspects, but actually putting that knowledge to good use to produce stunning photographs is a whole other story.

One of those techniques I have been dabbling with the last few days is called 'focus stacking'. It's a very simple principle and can be applied in different circumstances, but it's particularly useful in macro photography.

With a macro lens, the depth of field (DOF) becomes extremely shallow if you move the lens very close to the subject. That basically means that the portion of the image that will be 'in focus' or 'sharp' is very limited.

Think of depth of field as a square piece of glass, like you would have in a window. Now imagine holding the piece of glass in front of you, like looking through the window. Now imagine slicing that piece of glass through your subject, say a flower, straight down. Only within the thickness and boundaries of the glass will the image be sharp. Everything that falls in front of the glass is out of focus and everything that falls behind it is out of focus. Only within the thickness of the glass you have focus. And with macro lenses focused close up, the piece of glass becomes very thin. That's simply a given. Even a very high aperture is not always the solution. It doesn't increase the DOF (the thickness of the glass) enough, or there's not enough light to increase the aperture.

So, you take a picture of a bug, and only a tiny part of it is in focus. You can see that in the self portrait: Only the ass of the fly is sharp, the rest is blurry.

That's where focus stacking can come to the rescue.

What you do is take successive pictures of the same subject, but with each picture you shift the focus a little bit. Then in the end you run some software that's gonna combine the different pictures into one, picking only the in focus parts from every photo you took.

There's a catch: If your subject moves in between shots, the attempt fails, so it works best with subjects that are static. Insects are not very easy in that respect.

Here's one of the first results. Not a photo I particularly like, this was just a test subject.

It consists of nine photos. The first picture is the first of the nine, the second picture is the last of the nine, and the third picture is the stacked result, where more or less the whole flower is in focus.

First of the nine...

Last of the nine...

All nine combined...
Click on the photos for the larger version...

Self portrait

Self-portrait: my reflection in the ass of a fly.
Size of the fly: more or less the size of the fingernail on your pinkie (unless you didn't clip that nail for a while).
Click on the photo for the larger version...