Wood louse, 5:1, Heesch, Netherlands

I think this is a wood louse. I found it belly up at the bottom of my shallow pond.

As a positive note, slowly I'm improving the technical quality at higher magnifications, in particular sharpness and the preservation of detail. It looks OK to me at this level, yet as you zoom in a mistake becomes visible: rows of alternating sharp and unsharp parts. This means the step size of the stack was too big.

Positivity ends there, as I did almost everything else wrong, in particular the handling of this subject. I tried to pierce it with a needle on the underside, yet pierced too hard, straight through it. An irreversable mistake that makes a total body shot impossible. The idea was bad in any case, as for such a lengthy subject, it means it hangs down on both sides, a very unnatural pose. Another problem is the other antennae curled up wrapped around its head, something I do not have the tools for to fix. I also failed to clean it, see algae threads on the subject.

In other words, a lot of potential wasted. I don't despair over these mistakes, I just acknowledge that once technical quality is somewhat under control, specimen preparation becomes the next frontier to improve upon.

Features I found interesting at this magnification are the berry-like eyes and its spotted head pattern.