Amazing

I love macro photography and NatGeo sent along a link to some astounding examples of that sort of work in a weekly e-mail I receive from them.  A couple of examples:

Click to embiggen... REALLY embiggen

All of the images are of bees and they are truly astounding in their clarity and composition.  Macro photography isn't easy, especially when you're shooting living subjects.  Here's how they did it, in part:

Four years ago, Gutierrez came up with a system that consisted of a camera fitted with a macro lens, a mount with a slider, and digital software suitable for stitching pictures together.

Taking images at the level of magnification needed for bees or mosquitoes meant that there was absolutely no depth of field, says Droege. Only portions of an insect would be in focus at any one time.

So if researchers or Army personnel wanted a picture of an insect that was completely in focus, they would have to take several pictures—each one focused at different points—of the specimen and combine the photographs for one in-focus image.

The entire article is here.  You should go look.

In other news... we stayed abed waaay too long this morning, rolling out at 1130 hrs.  Which meant we missed the first two periods of the Wings - Caps game, which was one of the best I've seen the Wings play this year even if they did lose on a power play goal in OT.  Oh, well.  We got the loser point, anyhoo.

And now it's on to answer the overnight mail while I finish off the remainder of the morning coffee.  It's a lazy Sunday.