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Comment by Jun8 | Hacker News Reader

“To capture tiny parts of the creatures in perfect focus, Danke puts his camera on a high-precision macro rail that can move in the micrometer—one millionth of a meter—range.”

I was amazed by this and thought such a high-end rail would be thousands of dollars. Nope, there are models on Amazon for $200!

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You need a rail and dead insect to get the sort of super detailed photos in the article. But you can get decent photos of live insects handheld with a macro lens and flash (and some patience!).

I wonder how he got these perfect specimens to photgraph? Capture them in a buglight jar and suffocate them? He had to have been doing it fairly quickly so their carcass didn't deteriorate before he got the photos.

One of the approaches is putting insects into freezer

Indeed. That's how I shoot insects: live and in the field with a macro lens. It's quite a challenge, especially for the smaller insects (2-3 mm in length).

It is a bit easier if you photograph them in the morning, when they are still cold and sluggish. You can get a similar effect by putting them in a container in the fridge for a few minutes. But don't leave them in too long! And warn your partner...

I'm more into shooting insects in the wild, when they are active and doing their thing, so I can also catch their behaviour. I contribute to iNaturalist, and a few of my observations have ended up as documentation in some scientific papers by local scientists.

Cool. Can you link to some photos online?

You can visit my iNaturalist profile and see the photos.

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/sohkamyung

And here's a Singapore Biodiversity Report that included photos from me (Figs 10-12) [PDF]

https://lkcnhm.nus.edu.sg/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2023/0...

Nice. The Black and white Spiny Spider is quite striking looking. Nothing like that in the UK, as far as I know.

While nothing like the photos in the article, I've gotten neat footage of living insects (and other arthropods) by putting them in a little makeshift container under my microscope, with strong lighting from the side. This is very much not a good setup, but it's allowed me to capture things like a front view of an earwig cleaning its antenna.

I typically do this when I find a little arthropod inside; instead of killing it, I give it a free trip outside without (intentional) harm, for the small price of experiencing an alien abduction.

That's really nice!

I can just imagine the bug trying to tell his buddies that he was abducted and examined by a massive alien creature, but no one believes him. ;0)

Danke will be stacking images to keep this extreme detail at all depths. Impressive.

I use a cheap rail and just stack the photos to get a decent end result.

I literally know nothing about photography and can do really high quality macro shots. Technology is amazing.

There is a replacement method: thrusting the insect by your tweezers. thank you did this search, it is a useful information.

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