I went through electronic cameras -- NG no real macro. Then tried extension tubes -- a pain as they change the exposure on most modern cameras. I considered closeup lenses, but discovered a 28-80 macro worked at a high DPI -- dots per inch level-- so that I could double the size of the result.
Unfortunately, my expensive Nikon Kool Scan didn't work because Nikon never responded to my requests for new software for Windows 98 -- the unit was first set up for earlier software.
Purchase of a new HP scanner and an adjunct gadget with mirrors should have let me use transparencies. But the later didn't work. So it was back to print film, scanning, grabbing images with Microsoft's Image Composer, sizing same and then erasing the toothpick stands that turned out to be the easy way to hold the fly in place.
The setup was simple. A standard page holder held a piece of felt -- color selection varied with the fly hue and saturation. The fly on its "pick" stuck into a block of Styrofoam. Two light stands at 45 degree angles in front of the fly held photo floods -- It only took three trips to the local camera chain to get two floods that worked, and I eventually switched to plant grow lights.
The camera was in line with the lights with the front of the lens about six inches from the fly. Auto exposures with apperatures set did the job with the apperature set at f/22 to maximize the depth of field. With point and shoot cameras it's tough to get the whole fly in focus.
Do use the hook eye or body ribbing to make sure the focus is exactlly correct. Manual focus is a must here unless your camera has a spot meter with a very small field. Otherwise you'll be focused on the background, not the fly!
Once you capture the image and get print film back from processing scanning is next. Then it's time to cut the image to size. For our purposes we used a 128 pixel by 128 pixel setup for egg images, a 150 by 128 field for stanard flies and a 128 by 200 or, in extreme cases, 250 pixel size.
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