Ant in Baltic amber - 35-45 million years old

This ant is no more than 1mm long, about the same size as those tiny black ants that get in your kitchen. Part of his back-end is missing or collapsed inward, I can't tell. It's difficult to even see him, and the amber also causes some optical distortion.

Using a 10x microscope objective adapted to my camera on the end of an 8-inch tube and a reversed Raynox 150 macro adapter. I'm getting around 15X macro, possibly a little more. The depth of field is paper-thin.

This is just two different crops of a single frame. When I get time I'll put the rig on a macro rail and make a focus stacked image. I also have another piece with some kind of tiny flying insect in it, but that one is deeper in the amber so I don't know how well it's going to photograph.





Here's the rig, and that's the piece of amber next to it:

That’s really cool, just curious and not doubting you, but how do you know the approximate age of the ant?

Only because that's the approximate age range for all Baltic amber. Or close to it anyway - there are various sources that list 35-45, 34-48, etc. but they're all around that.

Not to get too off topic but Amber is a decent stripper name. Not epic…but decent.

I bet a lens like that has to set a fellow back 50 or 60 bucks.

they make an attachment for iphone that does a lot better for less

Neat post.

This one isn't really very expensive, it's just cobbled together parts. The microscope objective has to be placed out at a certain distance from the camera sensor, so that long part is just a hollow aluminum tube. Most of the rest of it is adapters to get the tube mounted to the Sony FE mount and to get the microscope objective mounted to the other end. The expensive part is the focus rail needed to do the focus stacking, but like I said this is just one single image. A stack would be a set of probably 150 - 200 images on this subject, each focused at a slightly different depth, put together with software to produce an overall sharp image. I have a focus rail that does 1 micron steps, so I can easily do 100 images per millimeter of depth.

As far as phone photography...that isn't going to be quite the same thing. Most everyone thinks "macro" means "close up". Macro actually means that the thing you're taking a photo of is the same size or larger on the sensor as it is in real life. The sensor on my camera is 36 x 24 mm, so at 15x macro the 1mm subject is taking up almost half of the sensor width. The lens is projecting a 15mm wide image of the ant onto the sensor, kind of like a projector showing a movie on a large screen.

An iPhone sensor's physical size is something around 9 x 8 mm, so when you see an advertisement for a "15x macro adapter" for iPhone for 40 bucks, it isn't nearly the same thing. A real 15x macro on a 9mm sensor would mean the ant's image wouldn't even fit on the sensor - it would be 40% larger than the physical sensor in the phone. When they say "15x", they are talking about relative to the 1x projection, not relative to the physical size of the subject. Kind of like binoculars that say 8x, it means the size of the projection compared to the size of the projection at 1x. That isn't the same meaning as the physical size the image is being projected relative to the physical size of the object itself. It's a common use of the technical term "macro" that gives a false impression of the capabilities.