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Nikon small world

Started 5 months ago | Discussions thread
3D Gunner Senior Member • Posts: 1,025
Re: That was captured with a 5x objective
1

Joseph S Wisniewski wrote:

Joel Klein wrote:

https://www.nikonsmallworld.com/galleries/2022-photomicrography-competition/ant-camponotus

Can I capture this with a z MC105?!

Nahh…

  1. A really big ant. The notes say that image was at 5x magnification. If it was shot on FF, the ant's head would be about 4mm, which means you're dealing with a truly enormous ant, maybe 15-20 mm long. For a smaller ant, you can go with a 10x objective. You're on you own for that.

Still scary…

Absolutely. That's a camponotus ant, aka a "carpenter ant", probably camponotus ligniperda since the photographer is Greek. They won't hurt you directly, but they can wreck your house. That ghastly mouth is built to chew it's way through wood fibers, and the eyes are only used occasionally, since there's no light at all inside a burrow chewed into a dead tree.

Just for fun I have adapted an image of an ant head for the topic at hand.🙂

In my case, the ant species is one of the smaller ones, less than 5mm long, so the head size is probably less than 2mm.
The optical magnification was >5x, the camera APS-C and finally I applied a crop.

With a microscope lens the details would have been finer.

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