So now that I’ve firmly established my future as a crotchety out-of-touch hermit, let me actually post a thing again. Allie is imaging fly types and she sent me this crazy crazy looking fly. Those eyes totally remind me of the green goblin from spiderman.
You can’t tell from the final images, but these are stacked from hundreds of images. The head shot of this specimen probably took 150-200 images Allie says. Each stack is a tiny slice of focus since the depth of field is insanely slim on these lenses. Anyone who has used a microscope may remember that it’s difficult to see anything in it’s entirety due to focusing. This is the same concept for micro/macro photography.
Flies are incredibly diverse and while they’re typically annoying and ugly in our anthro-centric day to day lives, when you get up close, they can prove to have stunning wing diversity (among other cool traits too i guess… oh eyes, duh). I’ve always wanted to do a survey of the fruit fly wings in our collection but not really a priority. And it’s been done before (i’ll include a link below)… but i wanna do it too
Fruit fly wing study from UW-Madison:
http://news.wisc.edu/newsphotos/fruitfly.html
The Field Museum’s online catalog record for the fly above:
http://emuweb.fieldmuseum.org/arthropod/InsDisplay.php?irn=3130470&QueryPage=%2Farthropod%2Farthropod.php
Image taken by Allie Stone all rights belong to the Field Museum
©2015 The Field Museum
Beautiful bee fly (Bombyliidae)!
