Specimen prep routine used by Macroinvertebrates.org
Posted: Sat Nov 16, 2024 8:39 am
This from Andrea Kautz, the imaging specialist responsible for producing the images on Macroinvertebrates.org -
'The background I use while imaging is simply plain white paper. After the image is rendered, I use photoshop to blend the image background into the background we used for the site (basically a very light grey we chose that matched closely to what the white paper background ended up looking like in the photos). There were always some darker spots where shadows occurred that needed some lightening up, but over all very little post-processing. We originally tried cutting the shape of the organism out, but it never looked right with all of the very fine details you see with hairs and texturing when you zoom into a photo.
To prepare the samples for photography of the immature stages (basically everything except adult beetles, true bugs, and shells), the organism was placed in a small glass petri dish with ethanol-based hand sanitizer (the gel keeps the organism from moving around even a little bit, which cannot happen during the imaging process) and positioned as desired to look symmetrical and to see as many diagnostic characters as possible for each view. Then the petri dish was filled with 70% ethanol to cover the surface of the gel which got rid of any of the texturing created by the gel. For imaging dry, the specimen was simply placed in the petri dish and photographed.'
'The background I use while imaging is simply plain white paper. After the image is rendered, I use photoshop to blend the image background into the background we used for the site (basically a very light grey we chose that matched closely to what the white paper background ended up looking like in the photos). There were always some darker spots where shadows occurred that needed some lightening up, but over all very little post-processing. We originally tried cutting the shape of the organism out, but it never looked right with all of the very fine details you see with hairs and texturing when you zoom into a photo.
To prepare the samples for photography of the immature stages (basically everything except adult beetles, true bugs, and shells), the organism was placed in a small glass petri dish with ethanol-based hand sanitizer (the gel keeps the organism from moving around even a little bit, which cannot happen during the imaging process) and positioned as desired to look symmetrical and to see as many diagnostic characters as possible for each view. Then the petri dish was filled with 70% ethanol to cover the surface of the gel which got rid of any of the texturing created by the gel. For imaging dry, the specimen was simply placed in the petri dish and photographed.'