Wildlife

This image was taken back in May, 2023 at Rouge National Urban Park near Toronto. The photo features a portrait of a Six-spotted Tiger Beetle shit in macro at roughly 3.5x magnification and composed of 59 frames focus stacked together. I found this beetle laying underneath a big rock on a cold morning. Since it was still below 10 degrees Celsius at the time, the beetle remained perfectly still after I flipped the rock over and this was a big factor in being to get such a shot. In order to get as low as I could, I scrapped away dirt in front of the beetle to allow my lens and camera to sit lower on the ground. I laid down and made sure I was in a steady position before starting to take the focus stack. I used a Fuji X-T4 with a Laowa 65mm F2.8 2x macro lens and attached a Raynox DRC-250 diopter onto the lens to get all the magnification I could. For lighting, I had a Godox v350 on my camera with a Cygnustech diffuser to create some soft lighting. After importing the photos, I stacked the 59 frames in Helicon Focus, processed in Capture One and then ran it through Topaz Denoise for noise reduction as well as sharpening.