The male genitalia of Bembidion are small and partly transparent, with complex, multiple layers. This makes them hard to photograph, and hard to illustrate.  It’s especially hard to give a sense of the three dimensional structure.  I have been exploring ways to illustrate them; the above animated GIF shows one way.

That GIF was created using the rocking animation feature in Zerene Stacker, with later processing in Adobe Photoshop and GiftedMotion. The input into Zerene Stacker was a stack of images taken with my imaging setup (which I will describe in another post).  The GIF gives a sense of 3D, but may not be fully accurate, as it is taken only from one vantage point, and the 3D structure is reconstructed from that.

I’ve also explored taking two pictures from slightly different angles – or, rather, Julia Amerongen Maddison has explored that with me.  Here are two stereoscopic images.  Seeing stereoscopic images is not easy – some people do it by crossing their eyes until the images merge, others prefer to do it by looking “through” the computer screen and gazing into the distance until the images merge.  In either technique, you need to be the right distance from the screen, and that requires some trail and error.  One of the pairs below is built for crossing your eyes (the top pair), the other pair for gazing off into the distance (lower pair).