This is not just a picture of a fly. It is 61 pictures of a fly, taken in a very specific way to get all of the fly in focus. It’s called Focus Stacking. It’s a lot of work.
Let’s start at the beginning. At some point, a fly died at the bottom of the window in the door to my office. Today, I picked it out of there with a pin, and set it on a paper towel. All that is simply weird; it was about to get a lot weirder:
I attached a microscope objective to my Sony mirrorless camera, instead of a regular lens. (This involved spending about a week figuring out, locating, and then buying the necessary adapters to actually perform the task.)
I used a new tripod that is more solid than my older tripod, because if you are going to stick a microscope objective onto your camera, vibration must be contained COMPLETELY.
I put a platform under the camera that allows me to move the camera forward and back in very small increments: tenths of a millimeter.
I took 61 images of the fly, moving that small fraction of a millimeter between shots.
Why, you ask, did I perform this questionable task in this exact way? The answer is partly “laws of physics,” partly “I’m a crazy guy,” and partly DEAD FLY PICTURE!!!
Physics first. When you take a photo, some things are in focus, and some things aren’t. If you focus on your Aunt Ethel’s eyes, then the trees in the background will probably be softly out of focus. If you focus on the trees, Aunt Ethel will complain to your mother and no one wants to go there.
Here is one of the 61 images showing just the tip of one of the fly’s eyes in focus.
Each time, before taking the next picture, I moved the camera just a tiny tiny bit closer to the fly, and a tiny tiny new bit of the fly was in focus. So I took another picture, and I kept going until the furthest parts of the fly were included.
Adding these images together, and including only the focused portion of each image, would be tedious without Special Software, so of course such software exists. I used Helion, which is obscure unless you do this one thing called Focus Stacking.
(I had also tried to stack these in Photoshop, but Photoshop did a terrible job. Because of the fly’s hairs, Photoshop just could not figure out what was and was not in focus and did a weird, ugly job of it.)
I did have to play around in Helion to get a good result; it’s first attempt looked a lot like Photoshop’s. Unlike Photoshop, Helion has a revolutionary feature called “settings” which I played with until I got the killer result at the top of the post.
This is an obscure thing that I had hoped to do as a child, but it was vastly more difficult back then, so I waited 50 years and now—presto, I did it. I am very happy about it. :)
I think the fly was probably dead in there for a couple of months. It has dust on it, the exoskeleton is definitely not in good shape. But it sat perfectly still for 61 images, and I’m pretty sure that most life flies would not be willing to do that, under any circumstances. So it worked out.
The Fly
Nice work Ron. I am using the same software and Focus Stack. I did end up buying the Canon MP-E 65 2.8 Macro lens. What a gem of a lens. Lots of settle time between 75 shots of my Mason Bees. So much fun. Learning how to capture live insects safely, them and me.