Peter Virag, Aliens in our backyard (ANIMAL 2021)

Magical properties & textures of tiny creatures are revealed at high magnification which is one of the most fascinating aspects of extreme macrophotography to me. It makes me curious & appreciate of these small yet invaluable wonders of nature even more. These three frames were all created with focus stacking. I used a manual focusing rail on a sturdy tripod, constant diffused light source on each side to illuminate the subject as evenly as possible & a remote shutter cable to minimise vibration. The fly portrait contains 82 individual frames at 2.5x magnification ratio. The jumping spider was created from 52 images at 5x & the cicada consists of 162 photos at 2.5x optical magnification.

Images have been resized for web display, which may cause some loss of image quality. Note: Original high-resolution images are used for judging.