New Macro image of a fly leg

One of my new passions is to photograph microscopic images. I have been obsessed with looking at everything under the microscope. This included checking out this fly leg!

Flying by

I found this fly on my windowsill. It had passed on naturally! I popped it under the microscope and checked out the details. I spent ages looking at the wings and coarse hairs.

Close up of a fly leg!

Capturing microscopes

The tricky part of capturing images under the microscope is the shallow depth of field. This means a very small area will be in focus at any one time. The way to get more depth is to use a technique called focus stacking. This means you take multiple images, adjusting the point of focus between each shot. Then using photo editing software you merge all these layers.

Focus staked fly leg

For this image, I used the focus stacking technique. The leg was too thick to capture it all in one photo. I took 25 images in total. First I focused on the hairs on the underside of the leg and slowly moved my focus ring on the microscope until the hairs on the upper side were in focus.

The final edit

Once I had stacked the images I played with some editing to make it more pleasing. I removed the dust spots from the background, increased the contrast and converted it into black and white.

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