For the past four years, photographer and biochemist Linden Gledhill has been taking macro focus shots of various butterfly and moth wings. Gledhill, who has also photographed natural and homegrown snowflakes, designed his own rig (with the help of Cognisys) to help create these intricate and beautiful close-up perspectives.
All images via Linden Gledhill. Top image is of a monarch butterfly wing.
Over at his Flickr page, Gledhill describes how he did it:
Cognisys, the makers of StopShot have developed a fully automated macro focusing rail. This machine is incredibly well made and accurate down to 0.01mm. The controller automates the laborious process of capturing the images needed to build a high resolution macro stack by controlling not only the macro rail but also the camera.
Most photos were taken at 7X life size using flash. Image: Sunset moth.
To increase depth of field (DOF), multiple images were combined using focus stacking. Image: Papilio blumei fruhstorferi.
Gledhill is now using a video camera lens "Canon TV lens JF16mm 1:1.4" reverse mounted on extension tubes, which gives him about 17X magnification. Image: Papilio blumei fruhstorferi.
Image: Butterfly wing scales.
Image: Red admiral wing.
Image: Moth wing scales.
Image: Sun moth wing.
Tons more here.
H/t Notcot.