Tiny Baetis mayflies are perhaps the most commonly encountered and imitated by anglers on all American trout streams due to their great abundance, widespread distribution, and trout-friendly emergence habits.
This specimen appears to be of the same species as this one collected in the same spot two months earlier. The identification of both is tentative. This one suffered some physical damage before being photographed, too, so the colors aren't totally natural. I was mostly photographing it to test out some new camera setting idea, which worked really well for a couple of closeups.
Troutnut on Jun 2, 2011June 2nd, 2011, 10:48 am EDT
I'm using Lightroom and Photoshop. For this image the compositing was really simple to do manually, because the small sun images were all solid black except for the sun itself. I put the bright sun / cloud image as the bottom layer, and all the others above it with the "lighten" blend mode.
I've been doing a lot of other composite images lately (both HDR and panoramas) using Lightroom & Photoshop CS3 for the panoramas and the LR/Enfuse plugin for HDRs.
Jason Neuswanger, Ph.D.
Troutnut and salmonid ecologist