Focus-Stacked Macro Photos of Bugs by Photographer Nicolas Reusens

Photographer Nicolas Reusens has always been interested in insects, so when he purchased his first DSLR three years ago, he immediately dove into the art of macro photography. By using the technique known as focus stacking — combining several images taken at different depths of field — he’s generated some truly eye-popping photos of creepy crawlies from all over the world.

When we say all over the world, we’re not exaggerating. Reusens is half Swedish by birth and lives in Spain, but over the past three years, he has travelled to Costa Rica three times, Malaysia twice, South Africa twice, the Peruvian Amazon, Ecuador, Mexico and more to find and photograph his subjects.

His choice to user focus stacking arose from a need to increase his depth of field without stopping down his aperture. Stopping down the aperture requires longer exposure times, and in some cases leads to diffraction and reduced sharpness.

By combining anywhere from 2 to 200 exposures (no, we didn’t add an extra zero, Reusens actually uses that many exposures for some of his more extreme macro shots) using Zerene Stacker, he creates images that he tells us would be “physically impossible with normal imaging equipment”.

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Black and White Underwater Photography by Hengki Koentjoro

(Source: bobbycaputo)

Black and White Underwater Photography by Hengki Koentjoro

Weird and Wonderful

This collection of zooids (dactylozooids (the hunters), gastrozooids (the eaters), gonozooids (the reproducers) and the pneumatophores (the sailors) are more commonly known as the Portuguese Man o’ War. Not much is known about these creatures except that they sting. Aaron Ansarov turned them into beautiful works of psychedelic art, yet remains unharmed. Ansarov and his wife collected them from the shores of south Florida, transported them in a cooler full of sea-water to his nearby studio, photographed them on light tables (mirrored their image in Photoshop), and returned them to the shore, unharmed. To be clear, however, these creatures are on their death bed once they hit the beach. “When they drift ashore,” says Ansarov, “it is rare for them to survive the tide and be pulled back out to sea…sometimes they may get pulled back out, but it’s up to nature’s design.” To see more of Ansarov’s work, visit his website.

(Source: pdnphotooftheday.com)

First Working Compound Eye Cam Gets a Bee’s-Eye-View of the World

Just like the human eye, the arthropod eye is a marvel of natural engineering. But unlike human eyes, insect eyes approach seeing very differently. Instead of a curved lens focusing an image onto a plane of rods and cones, insects have curved eyes covered by “ommatidia,” each acting as a tiny pixel.

In a paper published today in the scientific journal Nature, a team of researchers from the U.S., South Korea, Singapore and China announced that they have managed to create a camera that mimics that type of eye — and all of its advantages and pitfalls along with it.

Because the arthropod eye is built, basically, out of hundreds (or sometimes tens of thousands) of little individual pixels organized onto a dome, they have two distinct advantages and one distinct disadvantage.

The good news: they experience a nearly 180-degree field of view paired with a nearly infinite depth of field. In other words, they can see almost all the way around them and everything, both near and far, is always in focus at the same time.

The bad news: you only get as much resolution as the number of pixels you have. In the insect world, the pixel war rages on. Fire ants come in at the bottom with only about 180 ommatidia, and dragonflies near the top with something like 20,000.

The camera the researchers developed benefits from the same advantages and falls prey to the same issues. The sensor is basically a rubbery, flat, circular balloon covered on one side with ommatidia-like nubs. The lens at the top of each nub plays the role of an ommatidium cornea, while the posts the lenses sit on act as ommatidium cones.

Because the sensor is like a flat, rubbery balloon, all they have to do to round it out like an insect eye is blow it up. The camera can then capture a 160 degrees field of view with no distortion at the edges; and no matter if the subject is close by or far away, it’s in focus.

For now, the camera, with its 180 ommatidia, is more like a fire ant eye then the dragonfly eye they want to make (it’ll take shrinking all of the parts significantly to achieve that feat). But the camera is still making headlines as the first working compound eye camera, according to an article in Nature.

The current prototype can only produce black-and-white, 180 pixel images; but future iterations could be game changing in the tiny camera game, with applications ranging from spy cams to endoscopes.

Migration

This body of work was created as a response to the increasing issues of urban sprawl and deforestation that are destroying wild spaces and displacing animals from their natural habitats. My images show a series of animals navigating through the ruins of industrial society in search of their missing homes.  - Nick Pedersen