Focusing on the small things in life... Macro Photography

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More from the same yard/garden.

 

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I have a LOT more, but it is late and I really should be off to bed...

 

[StromXTc]

The sensor arrays on spiders are neat and varied.

Building robots that mimic insects, or sled dogs if you will View attachment 232322

 

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For several days my kids had been telling me about this "HUGE" spider near the entrance to our neighborhood, which could be seen when driving past it. Indeed, when I finally looked, it was hard to miss because the web as seven or eight feet across. It went from the top of a street sign down to the ground and over from the sign at least another eight feet or so. Right in the middle of it sat this big beauty!

Okay, so this series is a comparison of the shots obtained from three different cameras: Nikon D750, Nikon D7200, and an Olympus T5.

This first set is from the D750 with the 70-200mm F/2.8 lens, no flash.

 

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This series is the same spider, but with the D7200 and the 105mm F/2.8 Macro lens, and my SB-700 flash..

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nd this little "hanger on" that had made its own web in that of the larger spider. The larger spider seemed totally unconcerned with the smaller. Perhaps some kind of symbiotic relationship at work here...

 

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And finally, the shots with the Olympus T5 in Macro mode. Some are with flash and others are not.

 

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There were two praying mantis outside our backdoor one evening and my wife pointed them out to me. So I grabbed the camera (D7200+105mm+flash) and headed out to see.

These guys are EVERYWHERE on our porches around the lights.

 

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Also found this hairy moth on the back porch the same evening. He was hanging on to a window screen.

 

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Two different spiders here from the same evening, both out by the side of the garage. One on the fence and the other on the garage siding.

This is some kind of Orb Weaver.

Dinner... Freshly caught

Another jumping spider, my favorite kinds of spiders.

My left index finger nail for scale... It might have been 1 cm in diameter.

 

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We were at my folk's place for Thanksgiving and I usually take my cameras for family shots, but also bug shots because they live in the woods like us, have a garden, and lots of bushes around the house. I didn't find much though, just this ant and spider crawling around on the outside of their shed.

He's on a hinge and that is a typical screw for the hinges that are about 2-1/2 to 3" per side from the hinge out.

 

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Early December and I found this big beauty sitting on the top of the front porch railing. It was VERY tolerant of me getting right up in its face and popping the flash over and over! It never once moved to try to get away from me. But, those little black dots in the main eyes followed me EVERYWHERE I went!

 

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These shots are also from my folk's place. We were over there for Christmas day. Lots of family pics, but I just couldn't find many bugs. Then I spotted this little thing. At first, it just looked like a black bug. Then I popped a few shots with the flash and WOW!!

And that is a wrap for bug shots in 2018...!

 

[Diderich]

Check this out, Scott. We went to see this at the HMNS, though I think the exhibit has ended. Be sure to read the technical details about how he got the photos.

http://microsculpture.net/

 

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Check this out, Scott. We went to see this at the HMNS, though I think the exhibit has ended. Be sure to read the technical details about how he got the photos.

http://microsculpture.net/

I think I have seen that before (the vid, not the exhibit). The ONLY way to get that kind of detail is with dead specimens and massive photo stacking. He spent a LOT of money on his equipment. The end results are very impressive!

And it looks like he rides a V-Strom... what a cool guy

 

[StromXTc]

That hiding Mediterranean gecko also has some interesting feet . Suggestion, catch one and put in a glass box and pic from below or perhaps from inside a window. They are quick and shy (they might be tasty too?).

The pics are incredible. Walking stick should have 360 viewing capability, maybe not below him however.

 

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Bug eyes are pretty amazing. Most bugs have horrible vision when it comes to being able to see at a distance and with regard to seeing high resolution detail. Most of their eyes are basically just motion/light detectors. But some, like jumping spiders and praying mantis have very good eyes.

Jumping spider - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Mantis - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

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Been playing in the back yard in the evenings...

My son, Daniel, is usually my spotter because he has the good eyes. Then I come in with the camera to get the shots while he moves on to the next subject. I've told him to look for critters up high so I don't have to get down on my hands and knees to get the shots. It is a LOT harder to hold still to get things focused when I have to do Yoga to get the shot! Seriously though, just my heart beating is enough to move the focal plane in/out enough to throw off the focus because the depth of field is so shallow. For each shot you see here, there were probably 5 or 6 more (minimum) that were out of focus and got deleted. All of these shots are from my back yard over the course of maybe 30 minutes total of wandering around. I only had to stop because it was getting dark. The bushes haven't even started flowering yet, which is when there are bugs everywhere!

This guy was losing a fight with a bunch of ants (the dark blurry spots behind him).

The gray stuff here is the galvanized piping on my chain link fence in the back yard.

This is spider is MAYBE 3mm long from front to back...

The brown background is the siding on my garage. There are a bunch of jumping spiders hanging out on the garage. They like to slip up under the siding gap where each piece overlaps the one below it.

Assassin bug enjoying its evening meal.

 

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Great photos Scott! What macro lens are you using?

Nikon 105mm Macro on a D7200 body with the SB-900 flash.

So I spent about 30 minutes across the street walking along the dam for our neighborhood lake. It is usually a good spot for getting bug pics, but things are little slow still because a lot of stuff that flowers over there is just now budding. So the spiders and bees are not out in full force yet. There are some dragon flies, damsel flies, some spiders, lots of caterpillars, and some other stuff. To find most of it, I had to just pick a spot, look down at the bushes and not try to focus on anything, letting any movement catch my eye. Then I would get in close to see what was moving. Most of the flying critters were stationary because of the cold front that came through earlier in the day. That helps a lot.

This Dragon Fly let me move stuff out of the way and never flinched. Normally, on a warmer day, it is hard to even get close to them.

This is a Damsel Fly. They are much smaller than Dragon Flies and their wings come out the back of their torso instead of off the top. These are even more twitchy than the Dragon Fly when it comes to getting close to them, but they were less active today as well.

I can't remember what these are called, but we've always called them Katy Deads... They are maybe 3/8" - 1/2" long and as you can see have no wings. They are shy and as soon as they notice me, they start trying to climb to the underside of whatever they are clinging to. If I am careful, I can put a finger down under them and scare them back topside to get a few shots before they start trying to get away again. I like their eyes.

These guys are EVERYWHERE!! This one was unusually large and fat compared to most. Judging by many of the leaves around it, I am sure it was gorged

These guys are all over the place as well. Once you know how to find them, they are easy to spot. Otherwise, you'd walk right past them and never even notice they were there. They lay tight and flat against the stem or branches of a tall brown plant of some kind. They do spin webs. If they are near the top of the plant, they will tend to pull the tips of the uppermost branches in toward the center, bending them like bows. I'm guessing they are stronger than they look because they are bending some fairly thick branches relative to their size. End to end, they can be about 1-1/2" (females maybe) or more typically about 3/4"-1" (males?). I did see a smaller one pursing a larger one.

This is rotated 90 degrees to make it bigger so you can see more detail.

This is how you usually find them.

Normally, these flies would be all over the place. I think I saw 2-3 the whole time I was out there. This one never budged the whole time I was trying to take the pictures, which is VERY unusual! Normally, even the slightest change in lighting around them or a tiny bump of a nearby plant will set them off.

I only spotted a handful of grasshoppers. Most of them skittered away before I could even get into position to try to get shots of them. For some reason this one seemed content to let me repeatedly pop the flash in its face. It is hard to pick out their eyes because the color of the eye matches the patterns on their body. However, the eyes are actually quite large.

The kids were down behind the base of the dam where the over flow pipe comes out and forms a small pond and feeds into a creek. Looks like it won't be long before the spring batch of frogs arrives! Daniel found an OLD beer can in the woods that held water and had stuffed a mess load of these guys in there, but he did let them all go in the lake.

There were several of these funnel webs that I spotted, but only a few where the spiders were out where I could see them. I couldn't decide which of these images I really liked best, so I decided to just drop them all here and let you decide. Notice I showed up just in time for dinner

I think these are the smaller male versions of this spider perhaps... You will see some pics in a moment of a larger one that I think is a female, the one that was being pursued by one of these smaller spiders.

The remains of what I think was one of the smaller variety.

Purple Vetch? It is starting to bloom and is one of the plants that will be covered in all manner of bugs in short order!

So this is the one I think was the female (bigger butt ) and just larger in general, which is common among insects for some reason. It would let the smaller one get close, then scoot away. I tried and tried to get an in close shot of its face to get better detail of the eyes and appendages right next to the forehead. It has eight main legs like all spiders, but then has at least six more appendages for eating?

The head, with eight eyes, but it is hard to see them all here.

So here you can see the fat thing under the main legs and the smaller one hanging down just in front of that. The fat one is a jointed arm that has sharp prongs on the end. Only the "upper" arm segment is visible here. The smaller one is a longer leg. You can see it better in some of the later images.

Spotted this guy as I was giving up and heading home for dinner. About the size of a lightning bug.

 

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Here is my setup.

That is white foam board cut to make a tube and held together with duct tape. The flash head clip on diffuser is stuffed in the openend of the tube. It helps cut down on hot spots and also kind of catches the end of the lens, helping to hold it all steady. The chord is a pony tail holder I swiped from my girls.

 

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Got bored this afternoon so I headed over to the lake to see what I could find. The bugs were definitely more active than last time because it was a lot warmer today. Getting close to them was a challenge today because they were much more skittish than last time!

There were a LOT of these dudes flitting about...

 

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This is a new critter. I've seen smaller ones that looked similar to it, but never this large. By large, I would guess about 1/4" end to end.

Another new to me bug. Quite small and was on a leaf back behind the one above.

I am not 100% sure this is a new to me bug, but if not, it is the best pic I have of one so far. It looks vaguely familiar.

These are definitely new to me. There were a LOT of them in one area climbing around on the Purple Vetch vines.

 

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This is a spider I've not seen before. It is fairly large, perhaps 1-1/4 or so end to end. The eyes are super hard to see in most any of the pics. I was in a ditch near standing water on some kind of single stalked plant with bushy leaves coming right off the stalk. It was tucked down in there and tolerant of me poking around to get the shots.

 

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I almost stepped on this guy and the movement of him scampering to get away caught my eye. Once I started taking pics, it stayed put, even allowing me to reposition, remove errant weeds that were in the way, etc,... If you look close, you might notice a missing main leg and a truncated short arm on the left side of its mouth. Life as a bug is serious business...

 

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You might have noticed I have a bit of a thing for spiders. They are just so cool and there are a seemingly endless variety of shapes and sizes! So here are some more. Daniel helped me find these and he was holding the one in the first two shots, but it kept jumping out of his hands and trying to slide down to the ground on its web. He finally convinced it that would never happen so it climbed back up onto his walking stick and froze.

 

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These guys are really cool. I love the contrasting colors on them.

This first one sat mostly still the whole time I was taking the pics. Notice what is behind and under it in the last image.

I am wondering if that might be lunch on the stalk behind him...?

Or under him...? There were definitely a lot of ants out and about!

He got tired of me stalking him and started trying to get away.