Mounting and Cleaning Tiny Insects for Macro Photography

Nothing ruins a macro image like a dirty subject…

A poorly prepared sweat bee

As new macro photographers begin pushing the limits of magnification to photograph ever smaller subjects, problems that were barely noticeable at 1:1 start to create real issues with the final image. The sweat bee, shown above, appeared to be perfectly clean to the unaided eye, but after focus stacking a series of images taken with a low-power microscope objective, it turned out to be thickly crusted in debris. Making matters worse, the debris turned out to be finely powdered sand which resulted in hundreds of ugly hotspots in the image. This reflective dust also interfered with the focus stacking program, creating excessive artifact throughout the image.

In the following image you can see the huge difference that careful cleaning makes.

The same sweat bee after a good wash

In this video I will walk you through my workflow for mounting and cleaning the tiniest insects. I’ll also demonstrate my methods for posing insect appendages in preparation for focus stacking. There is a lot of information to cover - so lets jump right in…