It's an easy mistake to make, but I believe that only diptera have vertical, hook-shpaed mouthparts. And the posterior spiracles scream Brachycera. But that's me being all entomological.
I wish I had your photography skills - I have a new subfamily/tribe of Muscidae for BugGuide but I can't get good enough pictures to illustrate the diagnostic features.
Thanks on the second point. Nothing worse than someone seeing a photo you're proud of and saying "Wow I wish I had a camera like that!" In this case, however, I think it might help you. My last few bugguide photos have been miles above, simply because I started using a different lens. Now I have a manual macro zoom on my digital slr. It's a little awkward (since the lens slides out when the camera is pointed down) but if I'm mindful I get much much better shots. What are you shooting with?
I've actually got several options: There's a fixed-focus camera mounted into our laboratory microscope, which is a pretty crappy camera, but I can manually crank the focus down to get a series of montageable images.
The other is my new USB microscope, which gets decent magnification, but is very challenging to position and focus.
The last is my older DSLR that doesn't support interchangeable lenses. I do, however, have 1,2,4, and 10x stackable diopters, which do a decent-not-great job, and suffer from major depth of scale limitations.
Wow, I dunno. That sounds like pretty good equipment, but I'm not familiar with microscopy stuff. Mine were all from putting a hand-held camera on the lens. Good luck with it! Interested in being a guest on the podcast some time?
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I wish I had your photography skills - I have a new subfamily/tribe of Muscidae for BugGuide but I can't get good enough pictures to illustrate the diagnostic features.
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Thanks on the second point. Nothing worse than someone seeing a photo you're proud of and saying "Wow I wish I had a camera like that!" In this case, however, I think it might help you. My last few bugguide photos have been miles above, simply because I started using a different lens. Now I have a manual macro zoom on my digital slr. It's a little awkward (since the lens slides out when the camera is pointed down) but if I'm mindful I get much much better shots. What are you shooting with?
Reply
The other is my new USB microscope, which gets decent magnification, but is very challenging to position and focus.
The last is my older DSLR that doesn't support interchangeable lenses. I do, however, have 1,2,4, and 10x stackable diopters, which do a decent-not-great job, and suffer from major depth of scale limitations.
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