Discussing microlepidoptera photography

At best of my knowledge, only Canon SRL digital cameras have live view facility, so your choice is restricted to this brand.
I add that I doubt you would ever obtain a resolution up to wing scales of a Tortricidae with a 50 mm macro lens.

Hi Chris, of course I have seen your website, it is so well known now that it pops up on second place when you search "microlepidoptera" on google. com !

The Canon 40D looks already nice, and would be in the price range I set for the camera itself, 400 euro to max. 600 euro.

Ok now to your site Chris, I saw some example pics of Gnorimoschema sedgwickensis, the pic does look great indeed but it is for me of rather large size ( 15 mm wingspan ) and it has no metallic colors, I think metallic scales are another thing that gives you a pain in the ass when taking a pic and get propper lightning down to the levels I want it to get.

I will attach to this post a pic of a Tortricidae I made with the cam of a friend ( Nikon D700, a common 500mm, and 3 rings to change the focal length, I think I got it down to somewhat 60 or 70 mm). You see that it is resolution wise pretty close to yours, you can see the scales ( the lightning is s*h*i*t*ty but that is another topic ).

I also saw your post on how to light the specimen, I will keep that method in consideration and try to do it myself, but I would also like to hear if people have different methods, solutions.

...well as I got now people into the discussion I also want to go a little bit in the math part of the topic, I am about to do my diploma in physics,... nevertheless I suck at optics and need people to confirm if I got it right or not ;D

I will upload now a few pics in differrent posts, I coudl upload them into 1 post using flickr but then they may get lost when I delete them on flickr and I hope the topic will grow large, good and helpful and should thus be conserved for later.

Here the 18 mm Tortricidae:

and problem case number 2, an Yponomeutidae, Argyreshtiinae, Argyresthia goedartella. It has metallic scales and it makes the pic even more blurry than before. Also pic taken with the Nikon D700

I think you have to do stack. Here I am posting an image at low resolution of a Buprestidae (Acmaeoderella gibbosula). It is 3 mm in leght. I obtained the image with a Nikon D90, 3 Kenko extension tubes, 85 mm MicroNikkor lens and ring flash Nikon SB-29.
BUT I had to take about 10 shots in sequence at different focus depth, and later I obtained an all-in-focus image with CombineZM, a freeware software of stacking.
Light is also important, as correctly underlined by Chris in his interesting posting. I use as diffuser a plastic glass without the bottom. It's enough to obtain a diffuse light, less shadows and a good resolution of scales.



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@ Maurizio : Yes I know about stacking and wanted to use it to, but with much less pics, the butterflies are much flatter than beetles, for beetles stackign is really important, in butterflies you just need 2-3 pics depending how thick the body is. Well I need to come up with a good solution for my light then, what I used on my pics was a box with 30 LED lights in it and I did not put anything before them to diffuse the light.

@ Chris, now you got what I want to photograph, those bloody Nepticulidae. Your pic is already really good and it is nice to see the scaling on the wings. I showed my friend your post ( that studies design and is semi-professional photographer, he took the charaxes pic : insectnet.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=favorites&action=display&thread=129 ) and he said something like " ahh he used macrorings ", so apparenly there is more kinds of rings and I used the "bad" ones on my pics above. I just hope those won't become too expensive ...
For the life view on laptop, as far as he told me things recently have changed and there is more camera models that feature it.
The other micro does not look too good but I know how beautiful shiny they are in reality, maybe one would need an aditional light that will light from above to get the metallic reflections, maybe one day I can come up with a good method on these.

There is little litterature, websites etc. with good microlepidoptera pics and Ihope I can change this a little bit in the future.

Yes Chris I do have a local museum, the Museum of Karlsruhe where I do voluntary work, with the largest Microlepidoptera collection in whole Germany ( Amsel worked there, probably you are familiar with this work as he also corresponded with the USA in his life time ) and the Museum in Luxembourg where I work as student during holidays. If I don't get a nice setup on my own I will have to ask them what they use... and there is still another method. We have a synchrotron here in Karlsruhe, I don't know if you know what that is, for those that do not know, it is a circular particle accelerator that accelerates electrons very very fast on circular orbits and they emit x-rays and synchrotron rays. The local Museum here in Karlsruhe uses the synchrotron rays to get 3D models of very very tiny beetles, I think about 1 mm, on the pic you can then see every single hair on those ... ;D ;D ;D

That thing will supply nice pics: ankaweb.fzk.de/website.php?page=instrumentation_main

Time to digg this topic out again =D

I had been busy by saving up some money and spending it again, now I can present first results of what I had planned. I went for the NikonD5000 and I choose macro bellows and a copystand as equipment, it gives great results. Tomorrow I will post more about the setup and pictures of it if you want to go for the same stuff, for now only a little teaser of what it is able to do

A micro resized pic:



A direct crop from a pic of Nymphalis polychloros: