Thanks all!
Awesome mate, I seen a few today on the fence and a species I have never seen.
Ooh, get any snapshots? I've only come across 2 species so far. Really want to find some more though, jumping spiders are so photogenic!
Tried to get a pic of a house spider today and completely failed. :banghead:.
My first ever bug shot when i first bought some extension tubes was a small spider on my window sill and was complete crap
It doesn't look oversharpened to me. I sometimes wonder if I can see halos in some images along lines where there are big contrasts (I say "wonder", because I really can't be sure), but then when I look at a larger version they aren't there. Your posted version did make me wonder, but the slightly larger version at Fllickr looked fine (when looked at in Chrome, which doesn't mess up Flickr "Original" size images in the way Firefox does). Must be some sort of perceptual/optical illusion type thing I suppose (or some peculiarity with my vision).
Check out the RAW shot after I'd stacked with zerene (below). You can see it's already looking pretty punchy without any adjustments, so I think it's just the lighting I got. I gave it a bit more pop and the end results looks a bit over done (for my usual tastes) but went with it. There could well be halos as you get a bit of blurring from the stacking process where the focal point moves from sharp to slightly OOF (similar to a gaussian blur type effect), but I guess there's not much that can be done about that.
On the lighting, given that you use the MPE, if you haven't done so I suggest you take a close look at what John Kimbler (Dalantech) says about it,
here for example. He says you need to get the light source as large as possible in relation to the subject, so given the way the MPE extends it looks like something that attaches to the extending part of the lens would be best. Something like the MT24 or a less expensive alternative. (I think you might find a ring flash more difficult to diffuse than separate heads like on the MT24). Kimbler uses the MT24, and he diffuses the heads individually, and he also adds a translucent "peaked cap" type thing on the upper rim of the lens to spread the light even more.
Yeah, I am aware of Dalentech's work and his brilliant concave diffusion. You can see in this gear image I adopt the same approach of getting the light source as close to the subject as possible to create a large light source. This is my extreme macro (for >5X magnification) but the flash and diffuser position is the same for lower magnification shots. I just use a smaller flash bracket mounted on the lens mount:
Tools by
Tim.Garlick, on Flickr
With seven images, and the time gap between them for flash recharging, presumably (some parts of) the subject move and you have to go over the image with the retouching tools in Zerene and pick a single source for the parts that moved? Does that take you long to do? (It seemed quite quick for the simpler 3-image stack I did the other day of a springtail, but I'm wondering if you get into anything more complicated/time-consuming in the PP phase.)
Quite right, I can spend an hour or so just retouching in Zerene. As I get better at stacking and picking my source pictures it gets quicker but I'm still spending some time manually correcting issues. I can get much better stacks when I have a full set of freshly charged batteries
See below for further info
How did you stack - hand held ?
Also as regard to diffusion - what flash setup are you using ?
Thanks. Yes I stack hand held. In this instance my diffuser was sticking out further than the minimum focus distance of the lens (you have to get the lens in really close). As I was shooting against a fence, I couldn't get the lens in close enough to focus. I managed to rotate the camera to get an angle (almost portrait) and pushed the diffuser against the fence. In this regard it actually helped with the stack as I was able to get some resistance when moving the camera forward, which provided more stability and kept the subject in frame. See above for my diffuser setup (you can click through to flickr to see notes about the various components).
Looks good to me...I'm also interested in your stacking technique and processing, something I'm hoping to try this season
Thanks. OK well as I've had a fair few questions about the stacking, I've put together this gif to show how it looks in Zerene. The technique I used for this technique is described above, but in general you just want to try and support the lens as much as possible. Usually, for the very high magnification stuff, I'm lying on the floor with my hand on the ground and the lens on that, so that's pretty stable. In this case, I used the fence and put my elbows on the small wall the fence sits on. As already mentioned, a good set of batteries to reduce recycle times also really helps.
This is the final stack I got. You can see I managed 24 images, but the focal point repeats the same section a number of times. Also there was just too much subject movement after the first seven images, so I was glad I managed to get that many! As you can see the composition wasn't ideal.
This was the result of that 7 image stack (before processing)
2014-03-09-18.38.52 ZS retouched - 7 by
Tim.Garlick, on Flickr
Before that I did get a 22 image stack of the side view. It wasn't moving quite so much so managed to use all the images in this one:
Salticus scenicus - Side View by
Tim.Garlick, on Flickr
Thanks for looking and commenting. Hope you find this useful!
