Photo Adventures with Curiosity and Learning

I have been exploring focus stacking. During my last trip to the US, I found a colony of Leucauge venusta - that weave more or less horizontal webs. In the early morning, with a low angle of the sun incident on the web, I sometimes saw in the camera image what appears sometimes there is what I called a diffraction pattern in a region of the image - similar to

Another example - illustrating a strand oriented at an angle to the focal plane.

Focus stacking requires that you take a series of images that are progressively further and further away from the focal plane. At the bottom of this page, you'll see a focus stack image of a funnel web spider. Fortunately, in reviewing the images, I saw that one strand to the left - was in focus and progressively turned into what I thought was a diffraction pattern. But perhaps its a Fourier Spectrum. Here is an animation of the sequence of images

Out of focus image

Animated gif of images passing from shallow focus to deep focus

In focus strand

A focus stack of a web that was bent at 90 degrees at the center - i.e. the region above the horizontal line through the center is horizontal and the region below a horizontal line through the center is hanging down- nice result - (using ZereneStacker)

A different algorithm, (using ZereneStacker)

Red dragon fly

An empty head

Yellow dragonfly

Mosaid of the compound eye (used to focus)

Skipper

Takeoff - wings before body

Hoverfly eating

Another view

Butterfly face

Planar wings

Fly with mosaic pattern of the compound eye

Facing me (curious guy)

Another view

Funnel web spider - focus stack to improve the depth of field

A different algorithm - you can clearly see the escape hatch behind her which is in the form of a cone or funnel

A different funnel web spider

Clearlly visible are all 8 eyes - 2 large and 4 small below oriented toward me and two upper eyes oriented perpendicular - pointing to either side. I how the spider processes this - perhaps to get a wide field of view - or does she simply switch from forward eyes to lateral eyes?

An "ordinary" image - shallow depth of field - A better view of the orientation of the 6 lower eyes and the two upper eyes

C. Frank Starmer

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