First picture of a dead water mite with focus stacking

Here my first water mite photographed with a Leica C Plan 10X and my macro bellow.

Water mite

This only a first attempt, I publish it not for the picture quality or for identification purpose but only to take notes on my photographic process and to keep some records on my progress. The focus stacking was run with ImageJ and the BIG plugin.

Things to improve.

• I have took 17 pictures with my GH1 but it’s not enough I think.
• The advance between two shot is not regular
• Some impurities (broken legs ?) in the Koenike’s fluid are visible on the pictures.
• As conserved water mite are almost transparent, focus stacking is not easy to run, some parts from the other side of the mite (like the back eye) are too much visible.
• I think I need to reduce the lighting during the shooting to reduce this transparency.
• The lighting was done with a common Ikea led lamp. I do need to adjust the white balance for this lighting.
• Maybe a more diffused light can improve the contrast.
• The framing was not well done.
• All the legs are forward maybe because I’ve used a « pipette » with a too narrow opening. I have to forbid pipettes to manipulates water mites.
• The image is not enough contrasted, especially to see the details of the palpi.
• I have trouble with ImageJ. I have to increase the memory allocated to the software.
• The BIG script was launched  in easy mode with low quality.

Notes on the water mite.

• This water mite comes from my Sri Lankan collection of august 2011.
• I haven’t done measure on the field of view of this Leica 10X microscope objective.