Photographer Chris Perani specializes in shooting extreme macro photos of insects using microscopes. For one of his projects, he focused on butterfly wings and capturing them in an extraordinary amount of detail.

For each of the photos in the series, Perani captured a staggering 2,100 separate exposures and merged them into the resulting ultra-high-resolution macro photos.

Perani shot the photos using a 10x microscope objective attached to a 200mm camera lens.

“Since I am using a microscope objective, the depth of field is almost nonexistent,” Perani tells PetaPixel. “Using a focus rail, the lens must be moved no more than 3 microns per photo to achieve focus across the thickness of the subject, which can be up to 8 millimeters.

“This yields 350 exposures, each with a sliver in focus, that must be composited together. This process yields one piece of 6 piece puzzle. The process is repeated 6 times for different sections of the wing with the final result being the composite of these pieces.”

You can find more of Perani’s butterfly wing macro photos on his website. You can also find more of Perani’s other work on his website and Instagram.

(via Chris Perani via Colossal)