Freezing Froghopper

Found this Froghopper sitting on my outside front door. Too cold to be active I moved the endearing creature inside and took a series of hand-held shots with my MP-E 65mm macro for focus stacking using Zerene Stacker. When finished, I put the Froghopper on a leaf in my back garden.

I'm no expert on stacking but these don't look quite right to me, nice looking hopper though.

you seem to have missed sections, maybe trying too small an aperture and failing to get any overlap?

George and Toby, I can see what you both mean. The problem appears most evident in the fourth image where the end of the abdomen is in focus and yet the middle part is out of focus. I don't think it's so bad with the other shots. Using a macro focusing rail would probably have helped to align the overlapping parts more accurately.

Shouldn't need a rail unless doing really large stacks. I would normally only do about 3 or 4 shots on a subject like this. Obviously if doing large number of stacks at wide aperture then you do need a rail.

Not bad- as commented some missing slices
Brian V.

nice set alex

Over all they are good shots, nice work.

Nice ones! Next time just shoot all the frames at f 16 , that's what I do when hand held stacks

Thank you all for the feedback. The first stacks were f11 at 2x (shots 1 and 2). The latter stacks were f5.6 at 3x (shots 3,4 and 5). The smaller aperture of f11 has clearly resulted in better stacks no doubt due to the larger depth of field in each shot. The reason I didn’t use f11 at 3x was to avoid diffraction. However, I was probably being too cautious.

Andres, your advice of shooting at f16 sounds good but would this be OK at 3x ? I suppose the only way to tell is to try it out and see. It would be useful to have some advice on what you guys consider to be the best aperture for a given magnification. For example, f16/1x, f14/2x, f11/3x, f8/4x and f5.6f/5x.