I have recently purchased the most amazing piece of software called Helicon Focus. This allows you to take images at different focus and the software will “stack” all the images together to produce a final image – completely in focus. What this means is you can place a large object under a microscope (for instance) – take a series of images all at different focus, and then use Helicon Focus to give you the object, highly magnified, and all in focus. The resulting image looks just like a scanning electron microscope (SEM) picture – but there’s one huge difference – its in COLOUR!!!
The image below is of the eye region of a dragonfly larval case. This was taken with a non-optimum setup of a stereo microscope with a Canon 40D fitted to one eyepiece (no eyepiece attached) and firing off different focus shots using a hand-held flash. The resulting frames were stacked using Helicon Focus. I was so amazed at the result that I have now purchased a “professional” microscope to take this work further. Much further!!! Keep watching this space to monitor progress.
Well I combined creating a mosaic, photomicrography, and Helicon Focus to get the image of a complete Fruit Fly shown below. I am beginning to think that it’s only your imagination that limits some truly phenomenal photomicrographs from being produced.
Take one Morpho Rhetenor butterfly wing and a good quality microscope. Image the wing using different focus positions and add all the images together using Helicon Focus. Finally – fractally sharpen the data using Noel Carboni’s Fractal Sharpening action – and the result is, shown below 
Take 14 focus-frame images and stack them in Helicon Focus to obtain a not very savoury-looking business end of a mosquito – i.e. the bit they dig into you!
Take 23 focus-frame images and stack them in Helicon Focus to obtain this huge depth of field on an opalescent (structural colour) beetle leg.
