This bizarre creature looks like AI, but it is actually a metallic wood boring beetle from Trangan Island in Indonesia. I was looking for other-worldly macro subjects, especially insects, and found this beetle for sale on insectnet.com. It came packaged, dried, and brittle. So, I put the plastic-wrapped insect into a Tupperware container, i.e. a ‘relaxing chamber’, overnight. A damp paper towel provided the humidity so it became pliable without the danger of breaking a limb or antenna off as I positioned it for photography. I then used ultra-thin insect pins to position the body and the legs on a piece of wood. After a few hours, the insect’s body dried again and that meant it remained in the position I wanted so I could withdraw all the pins. The face of the beetle is very small, perhaps a quarter of an inch wide. Simply using a small lens aperture like f/32 wouldn’t be enough to create the kind of depth of field I wanted, given the extreme magnification, so I used focus stacking and took 53 frames. Photoshop composited all the images together such that only the sharpest planes of each frame was used in the final picture. My settings for each frame were 1/60, f/8, and 400 ISO, and I used a 50mm macro lens with three extension tubes.
0 Comments