Cockroach Portrait

Photographing a small animal like this 2-centimeter-long Cuban banana cockroach, Panchlora nivea, has its challenges: You can focus only on a small part of the animal in one shot.

David Yager overcame this obstacle by taking multiple snapshots of the cockroach at different depths of field through a dissecting microscope. The 12 separate frames were then merged together using image-processing software to produce the above image.

This image won second place in the photography category of the 2006 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge sponsored jointly by the National Science Foundation and the journal Science.

--LiveScience Staff

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Credit:  David Yager, University of Maryland