In an earlier post I showed how I take large terrestrial mosaics (panoramas) using the Canon 40D in a manner similar to taking deep-sky mosaics. Not only does this give you a bigger field of view, it also gives you (ultimately) a very high resolution image.
You can use the same technique in macro-photography! Move right in with the macro lens so the object more than fills the field of view so you have to create a mosaic to reproduce the whole object. Then assemble the mosaic – I use the Photomerge package in CS3 for this purpose. The result is a very high resolution image of a small object that can be printed out at large size for maximum effect.
The accompanying macromosaic is a 6-frame mosaic taken using the Canon 40D that weighs in at 4500 x 7000 pixels in the original 11Mb jpeg image. The shell is a beautiful example of an Archimedean spiral in Nature – it is Thatcheria Mirabilis.
