Insect Compound Eyes and SuperMacro Photography

Any of us who have got really close to an insect, may well have noticed that their eyes often look like a honeycomb, or appear pixelated. These eyes work completely differently to human eyes and are known as Compound Eyes.

Below, I will explain the difference between insect eyes and our own, through text and 'SuperMacro' images taken with my Nikon D500 camera and Nikon 70-200 f4 lens, fitted with Raynox DCR250 acromat and Marumi Ringflash.

Insect eyes are very different from ours. Our eyes are similar to a camera. There is a pupil at the front that admits light, and the cornea and lens bend light to form an image. The image falls on the retina, a sheet of light-sensing cells at the back of the eye.

The insect eye, on the other hand, is a compound eye, consisting of thousands of tiny hexagonal tubes called ommatidia. Each has its own lens at the front and its own cluster of light sensing cells at the back. The tubes form an interlocking carpet that wraps around the insect’s head. The image is formed and each tube contributes one piece.

Insect eyes are different from ours because, about 600 million years ago, the ancestors of insects and crustaceans evolved vision separately from the ancestors of humans and other animals with backbones. Each found a different, but successful solution to the problem of how to form an image, and passed on that solution to its descendants.

Compound eyes do have a much wider field of view, which is useful in flight and wrap around vision helps aerial hunters like dragonflies spot their prey, as well as help all insects see predators (and photographers) approaching from any angle.

Unlike in the human eye, the thousands of tiny lenses, which make the compound eye's characteristic net-like surface, do not move. But new research has found that photoreceptor cells underneath the lenses, instead, move rapidly and automatically in and out of focus, as they sample an image of the world around them. This microscopic light-sensor "twitching" is so fast that we cannot see it with our naked eye.

The research has disproved the myth that insects have poor sight and the images they see are in actual fact extremely clear. 

Many insects can see ultraviolet light, which we can’t. It is known, that Flowers have ultraviolet markings, that are visible to pollinating insects, but not to us. 

As is common in nature, every kind of eye serves the needs of its user.

Standard camera set-ups, do not allow the photographer to get close enough to these tiny subjects, to obtain sharp 'larger then life' images. Specialist equipment and photographic techniques are used to achieve these results, especially with 'live' subjects. 

Some lenses are sold as 'Macro' and will allow us to get closer to our subjects, but for 'SuperMacro', we need a little extra help to get REALLY close.

Below, is the eqipment that was used to obtain all the images above. You can see why the poor subjects get nervous when this appears within a few centimeters of them!

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