Photographic Equipement

Photography set-up

Equipement

The photos were taken with a Nikon D70 digital camera equipped with an objective AF Micro Nikkor 60mm f/2,8D and a 1 GB memory card to store a good number of picture before transfer to the computer. For ease of the manual focusing an angled viewer DR-6 was installed.

Each photo has 1,5 Mo; with a resolution of 3008 x 2000 = 6 Moi pixels.

The camera is fixed vertically on a professional photographic mounting set-up that allowes a fine up and down movement to the desired height (see photo and details of the parallelogram for its positioning). All moths may be protographed regardless of their size from the smallest «micros» to the largest Thysania agrippina. Focusing is done manually with the help of the angled viewer.

Lighting

The light is provided by 4 adjustable spots equipped with incandescent bulbs of 150 W each placed laterally to the object and 2 spots with incandescent bulbs of 150 W  placed  over the object. This lighting provided on the one hand laterally and at the same time above the object avoids the shadows produced by the insect.

Insect set-up

The insect is mounted by setting the pin into a small clear silicone cube glued to a 2 mm piece of glass placed at 6 cm above the table. The glass piece moves back and forth allowing for proper placement within the field of view.

The larger and thicker moths such as Saturniidae or Sphingidae are pinned on a little cubed of putty placed directly over the glass on the base of the photographic table.

Two small clear polycarbonate plates, mobile and adjustable in height are placed at each side of the glass and support a ruler with millimeter markings that is placed in front of the insect at the height of the wings to allow the measurement of the wing span.

When needed, a piece of colored paper or cardboard may be placed under the glass to provide a colored background to the photo.

Set-up of the camera

The camera in used in the «Manual» mode to obtain picture of JPEG Normal of image size L. A correction of the balance of whites (incandescent light) is used by a setting at +3. The best pictures are obtained at a speed of 250 with a focal point of 32. The memory card allows for the storage of 574 photos.

After transfer of the photos to the computer, the software  Adobe Photoshop Elements 3.0 is used for an automatic correction and the classification of pictures by family (systematics) and by collection.

Treatment of photos/construction of website

An additional correction of reds has been necessary due to the use of incandescent lighting. In some cases additional corrections are done to eliminate undesirable background spots. The individual photos are reduced from about 1200 kb to 130-150 kb to allow a better speed of opening of pages on the web.

The website has been built using Microsoft FrontPage. 

I thank Hervé Ganem for his help on IT matters.

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2008-02-15