Sorting images & scanning leaves

This morning went on wildaboutbritain (WAB) and had got some IDs for some caterpillar pics I posted yesterday, most of them were actually sawfly larave. So I checked and updated those pics, and then re-sorted my other insect pics into the Scientific named Orders, followed with common names of those types of insect in that order in brackets.

After lunch I went in the garden and saw a caterpillar, so I took some photos of that, a fly and a couple of craneflies using the FZ5 and Raynox DCR-250, then posted the caterpillar pic to WAB for ID. Then I sorted all those pics and a couple of the caterpillar pics I merged together and ran noise reduction on in photoshop. The FZ5 & DCR-250 is a lot lighter and easier to use than the 450d + MP-E + MT-24EX, but its shutter lag is very noticable when shooting macro and the image quality leaves a lot to be desired when you're used to 10-12MP DSLR images. It's pretty noisy even at ISO80 and there seems to be quite a bit of fringing, probably lens abberations. However, the image is pretty sharp (probably partly due to in camera sharpening), DoF is large (due to the small sensor size) and the background behind the insect is lit up nicely rather than just being black like it would be with the MP-E. The working distance is also relatively large.

The rest of the afternoon and quite a bit of the evening I spent scanning more leaves. I found that scanning at 1200DPI is probably best - at 2400DPI I have to reduce the image size by 50% to attain reasonable sharpness, and at 4800DPI I have to reduce the image size by 25%. And of course, 2400DPI and 4800DPI file sizes are much larger. So it seems that the maximum resolution of the scanner (Canon N670U) is probably 1200DPI and it interpolates upwards after that. So most of the leaves I scanned today at 1200DPI. After copying the pics to my PC I have to open them in PS, assign a colour profile (wierd how the scanner doesn't do that, AdobeRGB 1998 gives good colours so I presume that's what the profile should be), and then re-save but with LZW compression, which reduces the filesize by loads. If I scanned the file at greater than 1200DPI then I also resize it down and save a copy.

I also went on the pinternet a bit, and read more news on dpreview and Luminous Landscape. The weather was pretty cloudy today, but it didn't rain today (except for a few spots). I hope the weather clears up before all the leaves are blown off the trees and I miss Autumn. I was also hoping to try and take some microstock style photos today, but I was just too busy.

Food
Breakfast: Lime marmalade toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Lunch: About ½ packet of Flame grilled steak flavour ridged crisps; Edam cheese with iceberg lettuce sandwich; satuma; flapjack; chocolate digestive bar; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Chicken pie; potato; carrots. Pudding was Rice pudding with stewed apple and blackcurrant jam - actually pretty nice. Coffee.