Driven Bug-gy

Hi everyone,  I’ve been driven buggy, by illness, software incompatibilities and balky hardware adventures,  recently. So, I’m posting some bugs!  I finally have a scanner working for tranparencies.  It is not a dedicated film/slide scanner, and requires fairly significant software meddling, so please excuse some differences from “fresh-squeezed” pictures. *smile*

Insects were probably my earliest fascination, beginning before I was in kindergarten; learning about the well-formed conical pits, at the bottom of which the ant lions lay in wait,  or watching the little wrinkly round dirt-and-web door flip up to allow the trapdoor spider to drag its next hapless victim down into its home in the hard dirt.  Butterflies ranging in size  from the tiny blues, with wingspans of less than a half-inch, to the big local swallowtails wobbled from the scrubby desert weeds to the small vegetable garden and the passion flower vine on our back fence. Now, with many of those local creatures endangered or extinct, I sure wish I’d been camera-equipped at age 4!

The first I’d like to share is from a day of “bee practice”, and depicts a honeybee flying in to harvest from a borage flower.  This, like most of the scanned shots, was taken on ISO  64 Kodachrome, using a Nikon FE2 body, a 55 mm micronikkor macro lens and extension tubes or a teleconverter. Lighting was provided by two small Sunpak flashes on a Lepp macrobracket, set up for a 2:1 light ratio to shoot at f11-32, by altering power output settings. Later two more powerful flashes provided TTL flash metering; same set-up, just heavier *grin*.

A shield beetle, rummages for damaging insects in our front garden. The black background is from the drop off of the flashes’ light; no attempt was made to balance the flash with daylight. Sometimes, I prefer the background to drop out like this, sometimes not…it’s one of the ‘whethers’ of photography.

The same with this little ladybird beetle; fill the frame as much as possible and let the flashes enable as much depth of field and stopped motion as possible.  It can make a closeup more dramatic . In this one my left (main light) did not fire, resulting in a stark contrast of light and dark.

The alternative, where only daylight is used for lighting macro, is a dificult dance with your subject and its setting to try to get the parts that count in human perception into your thin depth of field.  This hoverfly is swamped by the framing. until the image is enlarged. This is where I stand with my digital; I have no way to mount a grip with a macrobracket for lighting, yet, and it’s considerably heavier.

Sometimes, experimentally, it can be interesting to go to extremes. Using the set of three extension tubes for the Nikon FE2 body as a base, I added the full extension set from a Celestron C-90 telescope and to the end of that inverted the lens from an army surplus gun-strike camera, the type used to record the use of the aircraft’s weapons. I stuck it on with electrician’s tape. You can see the nice clarity of the lens, the great magnification and get an idea of its depth of field from this picture of a small spider’s leg hairs (nice spider, didn’t run away with all that lens coming at it and the flash going off).  Notice that the depth of field only allows for one upper segment of the three legs of a small spider to focus;  I wish I had a head shot!   I set this lens combination aside; the electricians tape wasn’t holding well. I hope to resurrect it for digital once I find some extension tubes and Canon T-adapter I can buy.

Lastly today, anyone know the genus and species of this critter I took a picture of in Ecuador?  Or even a common name?  The scanner does this slide an injustice; the slide is quite sharp. With something as magnificently camouflaged and as weird (check out the antennae)  as this I made sure I got the whole critter sharp and fit into the frame as large as possible, verticality of porch post be hanged!

What kind of critters do you like to photograph?

Cheers,

pete