While on a walk a few days ago, I spotted a dead tiger beetle lying on the ground. Even though it was no longer alive, the metallic colors caught my attention. This is a very common species in my area, but this was my first opportunity to take a look at it up close without it running away soon after. Impressed by its jewel-like iridescence, I took the beetle home, naive to the work ahead of me.
I didn’t realize how much preparation goes into photographing an insect specimen. Thankfully, I found this beetle before it had dried entirely, allowing its limbs some range of motion without breaking. With the internet as my teacher, I carefully learned how to pin and pose the insect so it would look natural in the photographs to come. That process alone turned out to be far more difficult than I expected. Simply moving the insect, let alone positioning each limb and antennae in to place with dozens of delicate pins, took immense precision and patience. By the end, my hands and neck were cramping, and I was fairly certain that I had done everything wrong. Thankfully I had not.
As each following day passed, the beetle held its shape, supported by a scaffold of entomology pins. After 7 days, it had dried fully, with not even the antennae flexing under the gentle pressure of a paintbrush. Only then did I begin the photography process.
Using two different macro lenses, I moved in close enough to capture details completely invisible to the naked eye: the texture of the exoskeleton, the reflective sheen of the body, the tiny hairs around the legs and mandibles.
Supporting my camera on a tripod and focusing rail, I shifted the camera body forward in slight increments to capture thin slices of the beetle in sharp detail. Some images focused on the eyes, others on the mandibles, thorax, legs, or abdomen. In the end, I had a long sequence of photos that individually looked incomplete but together could form one fully focused image.
I imported the photos into focus stacking software, which combines the sharp portions of each image into a single composite. The software does a remarkable job, but it still feels a little like magic mixed with luck. Sometimes artifacts appear. Sometimes alignment fails. Sometimes one tiny movement ruins an otherwise perfect stack. Throughout the entire process, there’s always the lingering hope that all the effort will actually produce a worthwhile image in the end. I hope that you believe that these ones are.
