Pixiq

In one of those rare fits of tidying that hits me whenever I am searching for some (any)  specious excuse to avoid sitting down and writing a book, I mislaid something precious. Or rather, I put it somewhere safe and obvious - you know the problem.

There is no real intrinsic value but it has been very good to me, in all sorts of ways. It is a tiny piece of amber, fossilized pine resin from the Baltic coast and in it is an insect - in fact, two insects set at slightly different levels which, as I'll reveal, is relevant for what follows. It has been found and re-photographed

I have photographed this many times before ( yes, I posted a version of it taken several years ago) using home built optical benches and then with my precious Zeiss Tessovar. I was quite pleased with the results, especially since I have received some pretty good fees for publication over the years. I used dark ground illumination - a kind of cobbled-together form of lighting used in some microscopes. It works, it looks good.

The insects are clearly mosquitoes but whatever I did I could never get them both in focus for I needed to magnify them and that created depth of field restrictions. However, for the past couple of years I have been experimenting with image stacking - in fact, trying to find ways that it can be used without too much trouble. There is no doubt when you get it right the results are incredible and have been a couple of posts on this blog showing the possibilities. At last, I have managed to get both those insects in focus and am amazed at the detail preserved by the amber over the millennia. It is all very Jurassic park – though any dinosaur DNA can stay where it is!

There is more than a grain of truth in the idea that we need to be under pressure to be creative - look at what gets invented in wartime and all that happened as a result of the space race.

In a minor way that works with me - there is the pressure to finish the next book (in which there is quite a bit on image stacking) and I need to get back to the UK to meet a young lady who has just come into this world, my second granddaughter.

Thus, I am rushing about doing my life-like impression of that well-known insect the blue arsed fly (Musca ana-caerulescens)

 I have been mulling over a series of posts that would involve image stacking because I have always had a thing about depth of field and remember being knocked when I first saw the work of the wonderful Lennart Nilssen  using scanning electron microscopes. I even thought of ways it could be done optically - taking slices as focus was changed, but I never foresaw the wonders of imaging programs that might combine the slices.

I have held off writing about this on the promise of a piece of software that I felt could be revolutionary in creating stacks of images. that very bright team of young Ukrainian mathematicians who constructed Helicon Focus have produced something remarkable called Helicon Remote. It has been available for a while for PC users but there is now a beta version for Mac - I am hooked, it really works.

With Helicon Remote, you can set the near and far points of focus on a macro lens and get it to create a stack of images automatically as it shifts focus a tiny bit in a series of precise steps controlled from your computer. It works with Live View, and for focusing at high magnification (using the aforementioned Zeiss Tessovar) it offers a screen filling image, far better than that from Nikon Control Pro 2.

Furthermore, it will also shoot a sequence with exposure changes for HDR enthusiasts and...will do both together.

I have produced lots of experimental stacks with some ideas that I will pass on. The images I’ll take with me on the laptop and will post in a few parts from the UK. If you haven't experimented with this, believe me when start you, too, will be hooked.

I'll post a full assessment of Helicon Remote, some ideas on getting the best from stacking (a review of successes and mistakes...)  and a detailed look at a legend The Zeiss Tessovar...over the next 14 days