Creating Monsters

I may have inadvertently turned these harmless innocent Red Spider Mites into sugar addicts as they sample the maple syrup I placed in their path. The maple syrup served its purpose of slowing them down to a stop to allow me to image them. The line across the bottom of the image with the vertical marks is the edge of a clear plastic metric ruler. The space between two adjacent vertical marks,centerline to centerline, is one millimeter. This image started out as a 4:1, at the sensor, macro image. I edited this image in FastStone. First I straightened the ruler. Next I cropped the image to remove some distractions, including a fifth Spider Mite in the right side that was only partly in the image. Finally I tweaked the exposure values by slightly softening the highlights, lightening the shadows, and increasing the contrast a bit. I'll know if I created sugar addicts if they are lined up at the door tomorrow looking for more maple syrup.

For this image, I used my manual focus Tamron Adaptall-2 Model 52BB SP 90mm f2.5 Macro Lens and Tamron Adaptall-2 18f 1:1 Tube and Two Stacked Tamron Adaptall-2 01f Flat Field Teleconverters with attached Tamron Adaptall-2 Pentax KA Mount, all attached to my Pentax K5 Camera, mounted on my heavy duty 1970s vintage Slik aluminum tripod with the legs partially extended, but closed together as one heavy monopod, holding the camera vertical and suspended over the mites, manually focused by adjusting the camera up and down (the lens was fully extended for the highest magnification), Shake Reduction manually set to 400mm, ISO 3200, f22 on lens, 1/180 sec, with fill-in flash from camera's built-in electronic flash.

Note: If you measure how many millimeters fit inside the space between two adjacent marks at the bottom of this image, centerline to centerline, at whatever size your are viewing, that number will be the power of magnification of your view.