Gigapixel photo mosaic of a Brown Marmorated stink bug

[Ncs]

Hi all,

I recently figured out how to connect my camera to my microscope and took on my first real venture into large resolution mosaic photomicrograph. This is a brown marmorated stink bug that I collected from the infestation of my back garden. The final photo is made up of 3192 individual photos taken at 10x magnification under my microscope. 87 focus stacked images were grafted together in photoshop to create one final image that is 26955x49192 which equates to 1.3 gigapixels and could be printed at 13.66 feet (4.16 meters) at 300 dpi. I learned so much from this and would love to do another soon. Many MANY hours will be lost to a project like this, but why not?

From a photography critic perspective, I think the lighting is extremely flat and the subject is very busy. This could be due to a multitude of factors but I am open to constructive criticism. Would love my next one to have a more studio like, soft lighting look that falls off on certain parts of the subject to show the three-dimensional form.

Below is the final image after being processed and retouched.

Untitled-2.jpg (201.67 KiB) Viewed 1092 times

55-87.jpg (154.98 KiB) Viewed 1092 times

The following image is the equivalent of what the raw gigapixel file looks like in photoshop. You can see I missed a row on the body of the subject causing the mosaic to be missing that information. I did clone stamp that information over just to give an idea of what a more perfect 2nd attempt could look like

Untitled-1.jpg (146.65 KiB) Viewed 1092 times

The following is an example of what a single focus stacked frame of the mosaic would look like before matched up to the frames around it

_DSC4297-Edit.jpg (150.24 KiB) Viewed 1092 times

55-87.jpg (154.98 KiB) Viewed 1092 times

[MichaelG.]

Astonishing … thanks for sharing that

MichaelG.

[WWWW]

Well done,
it sure was a lot of work, but very beautiful !!

[dtsh]

Nicely done!

What software are you using for the stacking and what microscope did you use?

[Ncs]

Nicely done!

What software are you using for the stacking and what microscope did you use?

Thank you! I am using a Leitz sm-lux hl that was kitted for doing semiconductor inspections. The objective was the Leitz NPL 10x/.20 DF. I'm learning that this may not be the best scope for this kind of work as the optics aren't super incredible (lots of CA and weird flaring) but it does get the job done.

The imaging is done with a nikon z9 in crop sensor mode and I machined my own adapter to get this to fit onto the trinocular port as close to parfocal as physically possible. ideally I would have a scope that could project to full frame and have sharper optics but I am extremely new to microscopy and don't really know up from down at this point and don't really know what to look for and how to look for it.

On the software side, I am just using photoshops native focus stacking function. Probably not the best or fastest, I am sure helicon focus will be better, but again photoshop did the job for this experiment. I think I will give helicon a try when I perfect my lighting as I am currently not happy with how flat the subject looks. Workflows always have ripples to iron out!

[Sure Squintsalot]

Lots of effort and a nice shot. But getting to this point is only the half of it. Maybe print it out and paper the living room wall with it? Now THAT would be cool.

[PeteM]

Very nice. It looks like something that George Lucas and the Skywalker Ranch crew would use for alien inspiration.

[Ncs]

Lots of effort and a nice shot. But getting to this point is only the half of it. Maybe print it out and paper the living room wall with it? Now THAT would be cool.

I certainly will be printing it out. Maybe not at the native 13 foot resolution though!!

As a very harsh self critic, there are obvious stitch lines and imperfect focus stack marks throughout some regions of the image. The hope is future attempts will benefit from this learning experience, and said future attempts will certainly be printed out