Thanks everyone for your feedback. It's nice to see that the little laborer's likeness resonates with some folks.
Bart, yes it is a challenge to get everything that's important reasonably in focus and sharp at this magnification--especially when the subject insists on crawling around, like this one did. So as you might guess, it took a number of shots to get one that was acceptable. And then some judicious processing, including use of some of the Topaz plugins, like InFocus and Detail. I've used a few of the Topaz plugins for a while, but after reading your and other folks comments on them, I recently purchased the entire collection while it was on sale. Still coming up to speed on many of them.
As for the use of B&W instead of color, that was purely a creative choice. I have scads of insect photos in color, and I suspect that many folks might prefer the color version of this one--color is beguiling. But I'm now engaged in a project to make a series of B&W insect portraits, and that's what I had in mind here from the beginning.
John, the magnification of the original capture was 1x, using an Olympus E-M1 and Oly 60mm f/2.8 macro lens at f/11. With that system f/11 results in some moderate loss of resolution due to diffraction, but I found that InFocus or Piccure+ do a pretty remarkable job of restoring much of it, so the compromise to gain DOF is often worth it. What you see here is a crop--also intended from the beginning--of about 1/4 of the full frame, which was then upresed by 50%.
