From The Colossal comes a great post with amazing photos of pinned insects, and the method used to take them will surely interest the photographers in the audience.
First, a few photos, which are in much lower resolution than the original. Let me add that these pictures, taken by Levon Bliss, will be on exhibit at the Oxford Museum of Natural History from May 27 until October of this year. If you’re in Oxford, by all means see it.
First, a few photos:
This video tells you what you need to know about how they were made. Hint: they weren’t single images, but composites of thousands of them, taken by a camera that moves only a few microns between shots:
And a gif showing how they make large prints. Such images of course require that everything be in focus.
h/t: Jeremy
Being a person who can’t even touch pictures of bugs without shuddering, I am surprised to find these photos “amazingly” (sorry! I couldn’t help myself!) beautiful. If I were fortunate enough to be in Oxford, I’d definitely go see them. Thanks for sharing such extraordinary beauty.
Spectacular! What a thrill it must have been to see those enormous pictures roll out after so much time and effort.
And to take snapshots of them on your phone!
Well, this is amazeballs if anything is. Unfortunately my visit to UK will be nearby Oxford, but leave too soon for the show.
These are wonderful and gorgeous. It’d be great to see them for real.
Me too! I wish I could fit them in my too-small-for-such-big-pictures-house.
Wow, just wow!
The technique of composting many photos can of course manage the limitations of depth of field and focal plane curvature. Useful trick for getting usable results from a crap optical setup.
Hmmm, could have phrased that better. Given a good optical set-up, you can achieve results by compositing which you couldn’t achieve with a real optical system.
As with everything, TANSTAAFL. The more crap the optics, the more computation you need. And even then there’re limits.
For example, fans of certain camera systems get all excited about the dynamic range abilities of the camera sensor. But camera systems suffer from flare and glare of various forms. Even with a mathematically-perfect lens (which, of course, doesn’t even come close to existing), you still get internal reflections bouncing off the sensor and around inside the mirror box. As a practical result, cameras are limited by the optics to rarely more than 12 stops of dynamic range, and those bragging about 14 and 15 stops from their sensors are just doing a better job at rendering lens flare.
To the question of throwing computation at it…a common technique to increase the capture of dynamic range is to take multiple exposures at different shutter speeds and digitally composite them — with lots of manual and automatic methods for composition. “HDR” is the common name. But, even with HDR, you’re still limited to the dynamic range of your optics.
Which means that, if you really want to photograph the scene right…you’ve got to fix the light. You could, for example, photograph the scene as is and again through a neutral density filter (or, more commonly, through a gradated ND filter). That works reasonably well for sunrise and sunset landscapes. In a studio, you’d control the lighting in the first place so the scene has exactly the dynamic range you want. Reportage can often use either or both on- or off-camera flash to control the light almost as well as in a studio — especially with modern high-power on-camera flash units that swivel, allowing you to “bounce” the flash off a convenient nearby ceiling or wall.
..and that’s just lighting, long before you get to questions of resolution and geometry….
Cheers,
b&
Nobody who has ever actually had to do it, has thought that photography is actually simple.
He says, scouring ebaY for affordable trinocular microscopes.
Well, I am having a geek-gasm here, since stalking and photographing insects is a thing for me. I normally don’t care too much for pictures of mounted insects since they often look very dead, but these are so good that it does not matter.
This is just fantastic. What wonders are all around us? And now we have the means to discover some of them. Brilliant.
Beautiful pictures, but I give thanks that these Beasts are small.
We have these types of optical systems at my workplace (Google “Keyence”).
They do (auto-) calibrated 3-D measurement (in some cases to 5 microns), focus stacking for “infinite depth of field” and HDR so that every part of the photo is properly exposed and you can move the image in 3D to see what it looks like. It does any angle you want, etc., etc.
The optics are superb. They use relatively small apertures and sensitive CMOS sensors and they somehow avoid loss of sharpness due to diffraction.
Very cool machines.
I remember reading about these tools being in development a few years ago. Nice to see they have made it to the workplace. Tomorrow, maybe my desktop.
The nice ones go for $50K – $75K.
But, for what they can do, and if you need that functionality, they are exactly the right tool and well worth it!
These incredible images would be fantastic in an oversized coffee-table display book, printed in maximum resolution on artisan-grade paper. I’d buy such a book in a second!