Some quite small (and some not so small) subjects in the woods

GardenersHelper

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Nick
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A couple of days ago I went to a local wood to look for very small subjects, springtails, barkflies, mites etc. I wanted to test my FZ330 with a Raynox 150 and 250 stacked, which can cover scene widths from about 29mm down to about 5mm. As usual I used my KX800 twin flash.

I didn't find as many really small subjects as I would have liked. Most were in the region of 2.5mm head and body to about 6.5mm. Several were bigger. Only two were smaller, a globular springtail and a red mite. Still, FWIW here are some images from the session. I have indicated the approximate length (head and body) of each of the subjects.

Background to the kit, capture and processing of the images are in this post in my Journey thread. There are 1300 pixel high versions of these images in this album at Flickr.

#1 About 9mm long

1179 01 2017_05_27 P1270437_DxO 0100RAW01cP SP7 LR6 c9mm
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

#2 About 2.5mm long

1179 02 2017_05_27 P1270448_DxO 0100RAW01cP SP7 LR6 c2.5mm
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

#3 About 4mm long

1179 07 2017_05_27 P1270523_DxO 0100RAW01cP SP7 LR6 c4mm
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

#4 About 4mm long

1179 12 2017_05_27 P1270502_DxO 0100RAW01cP SP7 LR6 c4mm
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

#5 About 9mm long

1179 14 2017_05_27 P1270575_DxO 0100RAW01cP SP7 LR6 c9mm
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

#6 About 2mm long

1179 26 2017_05_27 P1270658_DxO 0100RAW01cP SP7 LR6 c2mm
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

#7 About 2mm long

1179 23 2017_05_27 P1270650_DxO 0100RAW01cP SP7 LR6 c2mm
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

#8 About 2mm long

1179 29 2017_05_27 P1270668_DxO 0100RAW01cP SP7 LR6 c2mm
by gardenersassistant, on Flickr

More in next post ......
 
Nick, you`ve done it again, you amaze me with your focus, its so unreal. No. 2, 3 and 4 are so so spot on, but as normal all fantastic.
 
Thank you all for your very encouraging comments. :)

Wow Nick...I've obviously been spending far too much time hiding in the 52s - your work gets better and better. Such incredible detail but with a somehow gentle touch. I especially like #3 with the rainbow colours and superb texture on the wings.

Nice photo, did you get an id for the springtail?

No. I should try harder with ID's I suppose. Anyway, Chris has helped with that.

Super set and results. The details in the mite and springtail are awesome.

Think the springtail maybe Allacma Fusca

Thanks for the ID Chris.

Masterful work, all good!

Very nice, and very close. Red spider thingy for me.

Excellent set Nick(y)(y)(y) Love those soldier fly, actually I love them all:D

OMG! - You've done it again! - such superb results and the iridescence on the fly's wings is awesome - congrats again!

Nick, you`ve done it again, you amaze me with your focus, its so unreal. No. 2, 3 and 4 are so so spot on, but as normal all fantastic.
 
On my wish list is a video tutorial of your post processing . I'm already writing to father xmas :)

You sparked something Andy. I've been wondering about doing a new workflow video, the one from last August now being out of date, so I did another. Not a "how to do it" tutorial, more of a "looking over my shoulder" type of thing, following the activity as I tackled around 650 raw files that I captured yesterday in a local wood and ended up with the 34 JPEGs in this album at Flickr. The video is here at You Tube. You might want to set the speed to 1.25 as my delivery is very slow (some of my viewers prefer it that way).

The workflow in the video is specific to flash-based invertebrate images. I do the post processing a bit differently for (natural light) botanical work. I wondered about doing a separate video about that. Flowers etc are not nearly so popular here as invertebrates, so I don't know if anyone would be interested. (At two hours long, I doubt many people are going to be interested in this video, even though it is about the more popular insects etc.)
 
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