How I take my specimen photos

I don’t claim to be able to produce great macro photos of specimens but a few people have asked me how I do it. Here’s a quick run-through – feel free to add comments and share your own experiences.

I have seen some photographers using dSLRs and amazing light boxes but my setup is very simple and easy to setup whenever I need it.

The equipment starts with a decent, but not exceptional, compact digital camera – a Canon PowerShot G7. It has a 10 megapixel resolution with a good macro close-focus, decent quality lens, lots of program modes, adjustable white-balance, manual focus and +/- exposure adjustment.

I build a mini “light-box” with just a few white boxes to make the side walls; a piece of white foam to pin the specimen at different angles; my fluorescent microscope light and another piece of white card as an up-reflector. The light shines mainly down but slightly infront of the specimen and the up-reflector bounces the light up under the specimen to reduce shadows.

I either set the white-balance to “fluorescent” or I take a quick manual reading against a white card if I also have ambient sunlight. This helps the camera work out the correct colour temperature in the prevailing light. I switch off the camera’s auto-flash, set it to macro-mode, spot-metering, apature priority (f8) and then I’m ready.

I hand-hold the camera but brace it against a solid structure to prevent vibration – in my case the microscope turret. The spot-metering helps get the correct exposure and then I use the exposure adjustment to +/- until I get it right. The white background creates a very contrasty image so I usually over expose by about 2/3 of a stop but this really depends on how large the specimen is. This is where you could use a grey/neutral photographer’s card as a background to prevent the extreme contrast.

Once the photos have been taken and downloaded to the PC I choose which ones I will keep and edit them with PhotoShop. I always use ‘Levels’ to adjust the exposure again; ‘Crop tool’ to select-out the 640×480 pixel image; a quick ‘Sharpen’ to bring out the detail; and then ‘Save for Web’ to output and optimise the finished JPG image.

The system works very well if you want photos of medium/large insects for use in web-articles like these. But I certainly wouldn’t print from them because they lack the resolution needed to be enlarged and if you are going into print there are other much more sophisticated systems available.

The ultimate is an auto-compositing (also called layering/stacking) system, which takes multiple photos through a good microscope in layers through the complete depth of the specimen. Then on the computer sophisticated software selects-out the focused parts from each photo and stitches them back together. The results from this kind of process are absolutely stunning and give an incredible depth-of-focus.