To capture the specimen from all angles, covering a bit more than half a hemisphere, I mounted the insect on a rotary disk and tilted the camera up and down on a boom arm. A script rotated the disk by fixed increments, and each focus stack was captured using a WeMacro automated focus rail. The vertical angle was adjusted manually (only eight times), so it wasn’t a big issue. In total, I captured 111 perspectives. A full session of 1776 photos took about four hours. The main bottleneck is my Nikon D810, which isn’t built for such continuous shooting, it slows down to one frame every one or two seconds once the buffer fills up. I used a Tamron 90mm lens with a 20mm extension and shot in DX (cropped sensor) mode. Shorter lenses would change the perspective too much between focus areas, making image alignment impossible.

After batch focus-stacking all the photos, I ended up with 111 fully sharp images. The camera positions could then be reconstructed in COLMAP. I performed some color correction and background masking before feeding the data into training with Postshot. Out comes the splat, requiring only minimal retouching to remove the mounting.