How To Create A Macro Panorama

[growlator]

Hello, I thought I'd share a technique I've been using to vastly increase the resolution of your fossil photos. It is most applicable to shale or other materials in which small fossils have been compressed into a 2D surface (plants, insects, small arthropods). It does not work well for highly irregular surfaces (with great variation in depth).

General Idea: You have noticed that when taking macro photographs, there is a very shallow depth of field, the edges are blurry and out of focus, while the center looks magnificent. Imagine taking several photos of a specimen (lets say, a fossil insect), at maximum macro to bring out the smallest details. Unless your specimen is just the right size, you will only have a portion of the specimen in focus. One way to solve this conundrum is to canvas the entire relevant portion of the specimen with many individual macro photographs, cropping each of them so only the in-focus parts remain (more on that later). The next step is to feed these series of cropped, in-focus images to a photo stitching program to automatically piece together each section, thus creating a macro panorama of your specimen. The benefits to this are that you can examine each portion of the specimen in the highest detail possible, and go well beyond the normal resolution of your camera.

What you will need:

- A sturdy Tripod

- A Digital camera or HD video camera (equipped with macro lens or macro mode)

- Styrofoam

- Graph paper

- fossils in shale or other rock which is compressed flat.

- Microsoft I.C.E. free photo stitching software (outperforms adobe photoshop's "photomerge feature" in my tests)

- Enough RAM to handle a 100MB+ digital image.

Part I - The photos

To begin, you will want to setup your tripod leaning over sturdy table. Place your light so it illuminates the field of view of the camera when it is mounted on the tripod. Make sure no light shines directly into the camera lens, or you will get unwanted interference. Place your Styrofoam on the table, and your graph paper on top, so it looks like Photo #1.

The idea here is to use the graph paper to ensure that your camera is parallel to the surface you are photographing. When your camera is correctly aligned, the lines on the graph paper will more or less be aligned with the edges of the photograph. The idea behind this is to make sure you are always the same distance from the rock you are shooting. Having graph paper in the background of the specimen you are photographing will also aid the photo stitching software.

After you have mounted your camera & achieved a level plane of focus on your flat specimen, it is time to start the process of taking macro photographs of each area of the surface. The routine that works best for this is to move the specimen underneath the camera, sliding it on your Styrofoam platform from left to right. You will want to start in the upper left hand corner of the specimen, then move all the way across to the other side, with about 1/3 to 1/4 of frame overlap between photos. When you reach the other side, move the Styrofoam up and do the next row of of photographs from right to left. Repeat this process until you have canvassed the entire relevant portion of your specimen. The whole idea of moving the specimen on the Styrofoam instead of the camera is that you won't disturb your plane of focus, and the lightning remains constant. You can use a HD camera (equipped with a macro lens) to take a movie in place of a digital camera, just make sure to stop briefly each time you move the specimen around, to allow the video camera to focus. You would then extract the single frames from each area that had the best focus from your movie afterward.

If everything appeared to go smoothly,and you think you maintained focus throughout your series of photos, you can now move on to the next phase. This all takes practice, but I can assure you the results will blow you away.

Part II - The Crop & Stitch.

If you took your macro to the extreme, you will probably see some out of focus edges in each of your photos. You can crop these by using photoshop or any similar photo editing software package. Photoshop is helpful in the cropping process because you can create what are called "Droplets" which are more or less recorded routines to apply to a batch of many images at once. You can use this tool to record a droplet macro that crops out the outer edges of your photo, removing the blurry edges, and saving the in-focus center portion only. If it causes confusion, I will add onto this post later with a tutorial on how to create a time saving Cropping droplet for photoshop. This allows you to crop all of your images the same way in one run, without having to do it by hand (helpful if you aim to stitch a large number of macro photos into one image). Be sure to save your cropped photos as .png so you don't introduce unwanted compression (after all, the goal here is the absolute best quality image).

The stitching process is pretty straightforward. Once you have a folder filled with your series of cropped macro photos, you can simply drop it into Microsoft I.C.E. and hopefully, everything should stitch together quite nicely. Microsoft I.C.E will allow you to export your completed panorama in many different formats, the most relevant for this application will be .png or Adobe photoshop format. If you export as .png, the individual layers will not be preserved, but the image will be blended seamlessly. If you export in photoshop format, you have the option of including layers. If you choose to include layers, the individual layers will not be blended together to create a seamless look, but rather simply overlayed on top of one another. Sometimes this is preferred, IF you want to decide which layers should be given precedence, or If you manually want to erase the out of focus regions. Its worth noting that panoramas are never perfect, there is always some degree of error. It will be up to you to decide if this is acceptable or not, they are usually pretty easy to spot. This technique has been a lifesaver for me in aiding in the identification of fossils where the small details really matter. You will also pick out fossils you didn't notice before, as you fly around your insanely huge resolution panorama. I use such panoramas to outline the fine details of a fossil to get a better idea of what i'm looking at.

Sorry I was so verbose, Hopefully this technique will aid some of you in identifying the extremely small, and also help you achieve better resolution photographs when they matter. If you have any suggestions for how to improve this technique, I would be glad to hear them. Thanks!

[palaeopix]

This is a really cool way to make extremely large high quality photos of your two dimensional fossils. I've not tried the technique before but have seen the spectacular results of others. For example check out neilcreek's photostream on flickr for an example he did using flash. Here's the link: http://www.flickr.co...in/photostream/

[pleecan]

Very nice technique Growlator! I like the idea of curvature of field distortions can be detected with graph paper. A further refinement is as follows: Rather than a tripod, use a copy stand. With the copy stand, mount a micro focussing rail for precision vertical movement. Thanks for sharing with your technique.

Peter

[jsw]

Very cool! I've recently started doing multi-row panoramas for my landscape photography but hadn't thought of trying macro panoramas. I'll have to give that a try. Thanks for sharing!

[JohnJ]

Very nice tips and techniques. Thanks.

[Auspex]

Another advanced imaging technique, as can be applied to fossils!

Some of our members are on the cutting edge with this stuff

[pleecan]

A side note ... Helicon Focus software (from the Ukraine ) a very smart program that allows multiple stacking of 2D images in 3D space that helps solve depth of field issues in macro and micro photography applications has also a built in stitch function which allows clear sharp lateral composite images to be generated. PL