If El Luiggi can take time off from writing his thesis, then so can I. Although my supervisor probably won't see it that way...

This little spider was being chased by my cats so I rescued it, photographed it and sent it on its merry way outside.

This was taken with the K10D with mirror up and a 50mm Schneider Componon-S at f4 on a fully extended Pentax Bellows (171mm) together with 122mm of extension tubes for a total of 293mm (i.e., 5.86:1). All this mounted on a solid tripod and head. The focus was achieved with the bellows rail adjustment.

At this magnification, the exposure increase factor is 47 so I had to use onboard flash and an optically synched external flash to get the required light. The horizontal axis in real life is 4mm. The effective aperture is f27.4 so I wonder if the lack of clarity is just because I am running into the diffraction limit or could there be something else?

I know nothing or less than nothing about Photoshop, so I didn't do any post processing in Photoshop other than making into JPEG. The image did not appear to suffer greatly in sharpness upon doing so.

I would greatly appreciate comments from any macro shooters who are so inclined.

[Ole]

Very interesting to see it so close! A hairy beast! You got focus right, the only issue I have is that the main subject, the head, is dead center in the frame.

[Ignacio]

Good point Ole. I didn't pay any attention at all to composition. After focusing, exposure, lighting, and all the other things that one has to worry about to get shots this close, I just plain ignored it.

Having said that, it really makes me respect Brian Valentine's work because he gets the technical part right and ALSO the composition. I think he speaks "insect" though and actually asks them to hold still ...

Ignacio