Springtail measure ...
I've been attempting to photograph the various instars of this globular springtail species for Frans Janssens (FransJanssens@www.collembola.org) from collembola.org. He requested that I also include a scale bar (particulary for the juvenile instars), so I had a play with PSE this morning to attempt a method of doing this.
For springtails, I'm currently using a standard set-up; MP-E Macro lens set (at 5x magnification) + 1.4x tele-extender + a 25mm extension tube. I used this same arrangement to photograph a ruler marked in millimetres and overlaid the image with the white scale. I then merged that with a transparent layer and saved it. I can now use this transparent overlay to position the scale. I'm not sure whether there's a simpler method of doing this, but it seems to work!
This is a mature male of the species. You can see that it's ~1.1 mm long. I'll probably improve this by making a 2 mm scale as well, sub-divided into tenths!
Springtail measure ...
I've been attempting to photograph the various instars of this globular springtail species for Frans Janssens (FransJanssens@www.collembola.org) from collembola.org. He requested that I also include a scale bar (particulary for the juvenile instars), so I had a play with PSE this morning to attempt a method of doing this.
For springtails, I'm currently using a standard set-up; MP-E Macro lens set (at 5x magnification) + 1.4x tele-extender + a 25mm extension tube. I used this same arrangement to photograph a ruler marked in millimetres and overlaid the image with the white scale. I then merged that with a transparent layer and saved it. I can now use this transparent overlay to position the scale. I'm not sure whether there's a simpler method of doing this, but it seems to work!
This is a mature male of the species. You can see that it's ~1.1 mm long. I'll probably improve this by making a 2 mm scale as well, sub-divided into tenths!