Originally posted by WPRESTO FYI: The horsefly portrait I posted was a digital short stack, not a scan from a chrome that I was trying to find. The chrome was a live specimen which I captured, put into a clear container with a lid, I introduced a drop of molasses and when the fly settled to eat I gently opened the lid and took a couple pictures. That's an incomplete description of the set-up.
BTW: What objective(s) do you use on your microscope rig? I also have a microscope rig with several objectives but I haven't been doing such deep macro for several years.
It's still a very cool photo. That's an interesting use of bait, too. I'll have to give that some thought. I source all of my bugs as roadkills. I hike along, and sometimes I divert into the bush where it still exists, but mainly I scan the shoulder of the road for felled butterflies and other insects.
My objectives are not good. It's an old Swift 960 from 1982, and it's just fine as the old high school level microscope it is, but it's not meant for art. At this point I think I've honestly pushed it about as much as I can. I have better objectives incoming, they're (I think) a generic infinity PLAN APO model, but their tracking has been in limbo for weeks and I'm on the verge of declaring them lost. I selected them because they were fairly inexpensive and because I needed RMS thread objectives to use them with my old Swift. I'm watching for a used metallurgical microscope I can afford, which will be difficult but will probably turn up eventually. I want to try epi-illumination on my butterfly scales.
If you have any suggestions for affordable RMS thread objectives that would be better than I have, or any advice on oculars, please shoot me a PM so we can chat about it without cluttering up the thread.
Speaking of which, here's a bug I found the other day, just to continue things on. If I were going to caption this it would be something like "This is My flower!"