Nice Jewel wasp

251 stack photo shot with JML 21mm lens. Did well on Flickr!




Jewel Wasp by Johan J.Ingles-Le Nobel, on Flickr

You can see why they call them 'Jewel Wasps'... fabulous image!

Great Shot... You must have a great deal of patience

Stunning shot Johan!
The darker 'shadows' under the eyes don't look consistent with the lighting of the remainder (which looks like a ring light). Any ideas on what causes this feature?

Very impressive if it was alive. ?

Very impressive if it was dead. I can't imagine it posing nicely for 251 shots.

If I remember correctly Nass uses some sort of machinery to take the shots, I don't think it's done handheld. I'm not really up on it so I'm not sure if it's quick enough to use on a live subject.

Saying that they are very skittish insects so probably not.

Nahh, it's very very dead! The shots took about 2 hrs (one every 30s). It was sent over to me by Sam who heads up USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab, so it's really been in the wars so to speak. (caught in a field trap, they do this on an industrial scale in the US to monitor bee populations for agriculture). It was dusty, dehydrated, and covered with fungus and cotton (wrapped in cotton wool on its way over). Then frozen for 2 yrs, relaxed in vinegar, restored in Decon90, cleaned for 10 mins in an ultrasonic cleaner, and then finally had the H2O dispersed using Isopropanol. What I do is quite geeky . In fact the recovery is probably the really interesting part - normally dehydrated eyes are kind of gross but there's stuff you can use to restore them - see http://extreme-macro.co.uk/restoring-insects/

The dark under the eyes, yes! It's where the insect's body backs into itself so no light reached there. ie imagine looking at it from above, think of the nearmost edge of the abdomen onto which the head is attached like a W, so the dark bit is the ^ centre part (used 2 flashes, one each side). Happy with the pic though and thank you for the kind comments, nice to be a bit productive again. Been tinkering with this website far to long, now to make photos again =)

Fabulous.

Quite amazing! Not something I will ever venture into though, I try and get some decent shots of things that are alive, but unfortunately they move rather quickly!

The sheer skill and patience involved in making images like this one deserves a huge amount of applause.

Regards
David

Impressive, as all your stacked shots are. I don't think I'd have the patience.

Not a capture the moment shot then

Fantastic piece of work and such nice colours.
Interesting to hear about it's history

Thank you all for your very nice comments! I hope to make a small gallery out of these jewel wasps "American Jewels". I have a second one which I relaxed last week and pinned last night, hopefully for a shoot over the w/e. But it looks a bit knackered so we'll see how it goes. This photo looks to be my most striking shot to date if Flickr is anything to judge by, so I worked on some PP over the week and put it on my extreme-macro site homepage.