File:Collembola from the drainage of a hot spring in Lassen County, California - Stacked Macro 10x.jpg

Hot spring Collembola stacked super macro 10X microscope objective lens.

This little guy came from the drainage of a hot spring in Lassen County, California. The white fuzzy stuff he is resting on is a "Q-Tip", or an equivalent generic brand of swab.

I created this image with my old Nikon D50 DSLR. I used an inexpensive 10X microscope finite objective lens (160mm focal length), mounted on a stack of extension tubes with a Nikon to RMS adapter on the front end of the tube stack. There was no other lens- just the microscope objective- projecting an image directly onto the camera's 23.7 x 15.5mm image sensor.

I used Zerene Stacker to stack together 67 photos, combining them into the one you see here.

Each image was taken with the subject progressively farther from the lens. I used a micrometer stage from an old optical comparator to move the subject a smidgen before each new frame. Each smidgen was calibrated to allow some slight overlap for the depth of field, to prevent banding in the final image.

This allows the extremely shallow (about 12 microns, or 0.00047 inches) DOF to be compensated for, with special software than can "glue together" the individual 12-micron slices of sharp focus into a usable complete image.

The image as seen here was the complete frame from the camera (uncropped). At the 10X magnification of the microscope lens, that means that the subject fits into a frame that is 2.4mm across. So the collembolid is a hair under 2mm long, in "real life".

Lighting was provided exclusively by a small compact fluorescent bulb in the ceiling of the kitchen where this image was created. Exposure time per frame was 2 seconds.