Photo Print: Red Ant Portrait by William Banik

High magnification (10x) Stack of Red Ant. Full frame image, no crop, representing 3.6mm x 2.4mm. For the techies - details as follows: Canon 5D-III, MT-24EX Flash, DIY styrofoam bowl diffuser, Vivitar 3.5 200mm "tube" lens (old manual film lens), and Nikon 10x/.25 ¤ microscope objective. 5µm stack steps for a total of 369 images substacked in Zerene (batches of 20 with 10 image overlap), heavy halo cleanup in Zerene and Photoshop. Lessons learned - pick shallower stacks with hairy subjects, cleanup is a real bear. If you look close you will see some jagged edges on some of the hairs. I'll revisit this at a later date. Limit foreground overlap (antenna in this case).Stacking software has a hard time determining what is foreground and background. In this photo it caused the antenna to take on a translucent ghosting effect. I had to substack (slab) antenna by itself and blend into background stack. Really hard to get decent blend results. Another issue is background detail near the antenna is lost due to the lens focusing "through" it. While the Zerene is good for retouching, I found final cleanup of dark halos and minor detail blends most effectively handled in Photoshop. All in all it was a worthwhile exercise and I produced an acceptable image. I look forward to doing another subject and seeing how I can improve my technique/final image.

Picture content Animals

Art category Photography