High-quality Pictures
Updated: Taking High Quality Pictures of Weevil Specimens for Further Study, and Scientific Publication
Nathaniel N. Levia
University of Delaware, Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology, 250 Townsend Hall, Newark, DE 19716-2160, USA.
I have made some updates to my original piece, since my methods for photographing specimens for research and publication have changed and I believe the new methods give better images.
Taking high quality pictures of specimens is important for the further study of the specimens, and scientific publication. With some practice taking these images can be done easily and quickly. This is important as it allows you to maximize your time when visiting a museum collection and producing high quality images. Here I provide my methods for taking high quality images of specimens, and how to edit them. My photography methods and setting suggestions that I convey here should work for most cameras. I use these methods when I visit collections to photograph specimens for research, including when I visited the Curculionidae Collection at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History at the end of February 2024.
Figure 1. Dorsal and lateral habitus taken using my old method: (A, B) Gymnopholus algifer Gressitt, 1966; (C, D) Eupholus cinnamomeus Pascoe, 1888 (this specimen is in my top 5 favorite images I have taken).
Figure 2. My photography set up.
My camera setup consists of a Sony a6400 digital camera, fitted with a Laowa 65mm f/2.8 2x Ultra Macro APO lens, and a Godox TT350 flash, with an AK diffuser. For photographing very small specimens, I have a Laowa 2.5-5x ultra macro lens. I use a WeMacro macro rail that I control from a program on my laptop. Before I said I did not use a macro rail, however I had trouble taking images of smaller specimens, and using a macro rail has greatly improved the quality of my images. This setup is easy to transport and set up, my only complaint is that the macro rail is a little slow, but I have been able to photograph many specimens in a day. I set the camera's white balance to auto, the ISO to 500, and the aperture of the lens to f/11. Depending on my magnification I use a flash power of anywhere from 1/32 to 1/4 but generally keep it at 1/16. Please note that this setup will not be adequate for taking images of the genitalia.
I generally use a stack of unit trays to bring the specimen up to the level of my camera on the macro rail. I have the specimen on a piece of foam with something white behind it, angling it so that the view or feature is facing the camera's lens. For scale I have a 6 in ruler with a metric side, which I photograph at the same focal length of the specimen.
In the WeMacro program I use the start to end run mode. I move the camera back on the macro rail so that the parts of the specimen closest to me are just out of focus and use this as the start point for the stack, then move the camera to the parts of the specimen that are furthest away from the camera until they are just out of focus and set that as the end point. Then I run the program and the rail and my camera take care of the rest. To help with seeing that parts of the specimen are in focus I recommend using the focus peaking setting in the camera.
I use Zerene Stacker and Adobe Photoshop to process my pictures. Zerene stacker is a great, easy to use program that aligns and stacks your images. I stack my images with the pmax function. I use Adobe Photoshop to edit my pictures. I start by cropping the image, then I go into camera raw filter to edit the white balance using the eyedropper. Lighting is edited by turning up the exposure, reducing highlights, and increasing the shadows, and making some minor adjustments to the contrast. To add a scale bar, I crop the image of the ruler I took so that there are just a couple mm showing. I then add it into the image of my specimen. Using the set measurement scale under analysis, which is under the image tab to measure the custom desired length on the ruler. Make sure to edit the logical length and logical units accordingly. To add the scale bar, I go back to analysis and click the place scale marker. The text and scale bar are added as layers, and the size and font of the text and thickness of the bar can be edited accordingly. I usually do a line thickness of 10 pt for the scale bar. The text and bar can be moved to the desired location in the images, if the bottom left corner is not what you want.
Figure 3. Images of Curculio proboscideus Fabricius, 1775 taken with my new methods: (A) lateral; (B) dorsal.
This is my method for taking images, I am mostly self-taught but I have gotten plenty of advice from the internet and friends. This is an efficient method for taking pictures of specimens that does not require a lot of supplies, but still produces fantastic results. This method can be done relatively quickly allowing you to maximize your precious time at the institution you are visiting.
For questions or comments, feel free to email me at levnathaniel@gmail.com.