#24-1 : Starting my blog

Hello and welcome to my blog. My name is Michael Rennert and I live in British Columbia, Canada. In late 2019 I discovered soil animals and became fascinated by them. Soon after I began posting my macro photos on Instagram and started almost exclusively photographing soil animals. I take a lot of photos and can’t edit them all in a timely manner, so I started posting records of my weekend finds on Instagram which I really enjoyed doing as I can show my most recent photos, and I thought that that would work well in a blog format. That way I can write more about certain photos, my process, whatever else comes to mind, and also improve my writing skills. I’ll be posting unedited focus stacks first and as I edit them I’ll replace them with the edited photos. So you will see stacking errors, and unless I do minor edits to make them presentable, like white balancing or adjusting the brightness, the photos will have been stacked straight out of camera.

Backyard

We just had a week of very cold temperatures and snow (-27°C with wind chill) followed up by temperatures we usually get in late April and May, so I took the opportunity to check my backyard to see if I could find any soil animals, and found way more than I expected. There were many globular springtails, a ton of tiny eupodid mites scurrying around, quite a few blue oat mites, and slender springtails as well.

Mossy Brick

I like to photograph springtails from the side, but for a number of reasons that can be easier said than done. In this photo, the direction that the springtail was facing didn’t let me position the camera perpendicular to the wall. That caused me to have to shoot along the wall and take many more photos than I otherwise would because there is a lot more foreground to cover. I didn’t take enough photos for the focus stack, so I had to heavily crop the image to avoid a large out of focus section in the uncropped image.

Right next to the springtail above I found this spermatophore and got two stacks from slightly different angles.

#24-1.2 unedited
Spermatophore on the same mossy brick.

#24-1.3 unedited
Another angle of the same spermatophore.

I like to take deep focus stacks. That is to cover a lot of ground and take much more photos than you think you need. That way you have more options on how to edit it later on. You can see that the second spermatophore photo is more detailed, but doesn’t look as nice as the first one. When I compile all the images in my stacking software, I will select which images to use and try to use fewer background images so that the spermatophore stands out more like the one in the first focus stack.