Sea Urchin

Here is one of my supermacro shots again. Well, what do you expect ? It is bitter out there and I am still recovering from a late night flight back to Edinburgh from Madrid. I promise that there will be more interesting shots from our Madrid break as back blips over the next few days.

As the sea urchin is curved I had to use a series of 23 shots to get everything pin sharp. I took it because the urchin looked quite symmetrical and nicely patterned. You will be pleased to hear that I did not have the ultimate dirty lens or sensor and these tiny hairs are all attached to the urchin and I suspect part of the way in which it gathers its food. This is the second time I used supermacro techniques on what appears to be a tightly patterned element of wildlife (previously it was a cactus) only to find that all is not as it seems. There is chaos in that order. My dim recollections of biology at school was that if you magnified a cross sections of a plant you saw order in the apparent chaos. However, I was hopeless at it and had to give it up after a year. So you are, I'm afraid, no wiser.