DPReview.com is closing April 10th - Find out more

Nikon small world

Started 5 months ago | Discussions thread
Joel Klein
OP Joel Klein Senior Member • Posts: 1,320
Re: That was captured with a 5x objective

3D Gunner wrote:

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.

Wow!!! Look at the eyes!!! Very interesting array of? I’m not sure…

 Joel Klein's gear list:Joel Klein's gear list
Nikon Z7 II Nikon Z9 Nikon Z30 Nikon Z 50mm F1.8 Nikon Z 24-70mm F2.8 +10 more
Keyboard shortcuts:
FForum PPrevious NNext WNext unread UUpvote SSubscribe RReply QQuote BBookmark MMy threads
Color scheme? Blue / Yellow