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Part of my work is to photograph pinned insect specimens and I had previously been manually shooting then transferring photos from the SD card to my PC. At work our imaging lab is entirely Canon-based, so I was aware of EOS Utility, Canon’s own remote camera operation software. It wasn’t until I recently went to visit the Paris museum (MNHN) that I worked with Nikon’s Camera Control Pro 2 and realised how much time it would save when organising files if I was using remote photography software.

I started looking at the prices for Nikon remote photography software and Camera Control Pro 2 is fairly expensive, costing around £130 if you buy it from Amazon. Other commercial software was also fairly pricey (NKRemote @ $130), so I looked around for something free.

After a little Googling I found DIYPhotobits.Com Camera Control. It’s completely free and does the job (while using a paltry 373KB of hard drive space)! The interface was so simple that I have already taken photos of two specimens and depth-stacked them (in CombineZP). This means I can now remotely control my camera and produce depth-stacked images using free software :)

Here is an example of Zopherosis georgei (Coleoptera: Zopheridae) that I took today:

I have been meaning to try and make a focus stacked image after being inspired by some of Lord V’s photos and his various photo stacking guides for the freely available CombineZ programs, made by Alan Hadley.

A focus stacked image is a composite image with a better depth of field, made by combining images taken at different focal distances.

Orellana nigriplaga (depth stacked image)

This image is the result of combining the images below.

Preparatory images for depth stacking

I would recommend trying CombineZP, especially if you work with something like pinned specimens. I will be posting some more depth stacked images soon and might experiment with some landscape images.

This specimen is part of The Natural History Museum collection and was taken for a research request. © The Natural History Museum