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Macro > Elenagt19  > Nature > Macros
These are photos taken with a stereomicroscope or a macro lens and digital camera
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Elenagt19 > Money, Mayhem and Murder! Nothing good can come from a meeting between a California bark beetle (Ips paraconfusus) and a Pennsylvania ground beetle (Scarites sp.) with all that silver lying around. This has all the ingredients of a great mystery Novel but I really wouldn't know where to start.
Elenagt19 > This close up photo of a California five-spined bark beetle (Ips paraconfusus) is from a bark beetle series project my husband, Tony, is doing with the U.S. Forest Service (Seybold Lab)which provided the beetle and the identification. The beetle is about the size of a small grain of rice. Tony took the photo or actually photos as it is really a compilation of nearly a thousand individual photos by a special photomicrography system called Montage Explorer. He let me use it as it is an "unacceptable first attempt". Ever the mad scientist, he wants to use the "acceptable" photos to create a high resolution 3D interactive model of this beetle. Bark Beetles have been in the news recently as linked to the Global Warming phenomenon. Their explosive reproduction in our disrupted climate has devasted pine forests up and down the Pacific coast and the American southwest. They even get a mention in Al Gore's hit DVD "An Inconvenient Truth"!
Elenagt19 > This dragonfly photo was a result of one of the set ups in the auto-montage how to gallery. Montage Explorer is a program which will automatically create a selected number of automontage images in a horizontal and vertical (to the plane of the image) panorama, then stitch them together. It absolutely could not handle this object. It was necessary to make many separate automontage images manually and then stitch them together manually, a tedious and painstaking job since exposures, color casts, and perspective all vary from photo to photo. Nevertheless on close inspection, retouching artifacts abound. To be fair we are really pushing this system yet the people at Synoptics (US) and Syncroscopy (UK) have been working heroically with us (many hours overtime) to make it all work.
Elenagt19 > This green iridescent sweat bee is loaded with pollen grains after only a few minutes on the flowers! Check out those eyes. This bee is probably :Agapostemon virescens . The black and white banded abdomen is partially obscured by all the pollen. There is a nice concise description of these bees at < http://www.everythingabout.net/articles/biology/animals/arthropods/insects/bees/sweat_bee/ > While this is an OK shot done with a $100K&#43; Automontage system we are painfully aware that there is at least one fellow out there who is publishing even sharper and more dramatic live shots of insects using handheld prosumer equipment modified with coke cans, paper towels and a bean pole! He even uses free internet software, CombineZM, to montage vertical (Z axis) stacks to extend Depth of Field (DOF) focus. He is diabolically clever, highly skilled and certainly has earned his Nom de Filet : Lord V.
Elenagt19 > Bees aren't the only iridescent insects in the flower patch. This green fly was caught in the same patch as the bee at the corner of the cornfield that comes up to our backyard. While the bee above is a four winged hymenopteran, this fly is a two winged dipteran. The second pair of wings have become somewhat vestigal showing up as "halteres" the small round white things near the base of the true wings. The greek root word "ptera" refers to "wing". "Hymeno-pteran" means "membrane-winged" while "di-pteran" means "two-winged" as you might imagine.
Elenagt19 > Just for the fun of it! Here's a crosseyed stereo-pair of Scolytus schevyrewi, the banded elm bark beetle. It reminds us some of Billy Idol, don't know why. The way you visualize the 3D effect is to relax your eyes and stare through the screen into the distance. Let the images drift together until they overlap and Voila! a 3 dimensional image appears! It is easiest to do this with the "large" size. Enjoy! Info on this invasive species can be found at < http://www.colostate.edu/Depts/CoopExt/LARIMER/plantinsectid/>
Elenagt19 > An improved shot of red darter? dragon fly munching on the jaw plate of another dragon fly it had killed.
Elenagt19 > Another stereo pair at a different angle of S. schevyrewi.
Elenagt19 > This is a different species of green metallic bee from the previous photo. Still looking for a name. This is an enormous photo in original size ~50MB in TIFF and ~8MB in JPEG as displayed here. Not worth attempting to view the "original" unless you have a very fast internet connection (250KBS+). Instead use the smugloupe in the "Critique" style viewing to view details.
Another stereo pair at a different angle of S. schevyrewi.
> Another stereo pair at a different angle of S. schevyrewi.
Another stereo pair at a different angle of S. schevyrewi.
Original size: 2160px x 1359px |
Current: 400px x 252px |
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Keywords: banded elm bark beetle scolytus schevyrewi
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