Experimenting with insect shots
After reading Myrmecos’s blog on insect photography techniques I decided to try a few of the techniques for myself, particularly photographing on white paper. So I took a sheet of my kids’ construction paper and brought it outside. The weather here in the Pacific Northwest still isn’t great - and I managed to find a break in the rain we have been getting recently. Still, it was cold and windy and several times the wind blew away my paper (once with a poor pill bug still attached). I tried stabilizing the paper with rocks, but they tended to warp the paper too much.
The experience was more of a learning experience than getting great shots. The main lesson that I learned was that the flash needs to be compensated for the paper. As the light meter in the camera strives to expose the image gray, I need to compensate with the flash exposure. The next time I will try putting it at +1. Luckily, I take every shot in RAW so I was able to easily adjust the exposure without losing too much of the quality of the shots. My first attempt was with a millipede that I found.
I would have liked to remove the dirt in the middle of the millipede, but I was worried about hurting it. While picking the millipede out, I found another little critter that I still need to look up. Unfortunately none of my shots came out well of it, but this is the best one I could find. Whatever it was, it was tiny as I needed to take this shot at 5x.
My next victim was a slug. Here I think for the next time I need to come up with a better background. Ideally it would be nice to find something that can expose the slime trail. Also, I need to figure out a way to remove the dirt without damaging the slug.
Of course, pill bugs are the easiest to experiment with because they are so plentiful. I haven’t photographed one in awhile because I have grown rather bored of them, but I decided to get a closeup of this one.
My final experiment of the day was a centipede. This little bugger was quite tough as they move very quickly and it didn’t like the exposed state of the paper at all. After convincing it for awhile that it wasn’t about to get off the paper without a few shots it stood still enough for me to get some shots.
Altogether I feel it was a worthwhile experiment. I will likely try submitting a few of these to the microstock sites- you never know. The next time though I may try to find some more natural backgrounds like leaves.
Related posts:
- Insect photography as art Recently I have been involved in discussions with some coworkers about insect photography in particular, and nature photography in general. The statement was that, though technically very challenging, most nature photography is not “artistic”. This goes back to the old “collectors vs. photographers” debate. Are you someone who simply finds...
- My first insect porn shoot Last weekend for the first time we actually had a brief period of good weather, lasting from Saturday morning to early Sunday afternoon. In Seattle parlance, this was our “spring”. Most likely some day in late July or August will be our “summer”. Given the nice weather, Eitan and Nathan...
- The mysterious beetle solved? I mentioned in a previous post that I found a strange new insect when photographing this weekend. I picked up a bag of dirt and found some interesting things underneath to shoot. As I was above to coax a millipede onto a white sheet of paper, I noticed something tiny...
- A slug and a surprise Over the weekend, I decided to see what I could find outside. It was a bit cold, so nothing was obvious in the open so I turned to the standard process of turning over different logs and rocks to see what I could find. On turning over a piece of...
- Some fly shots from the weekend Two weeks ago I had the time to take a number of shots outside and had the chance to get two flies (OK, two of them are March flies). This one looks like it was laughing at me. Actually the more I see flies up close, the more I want...
Tags: centipede, insect, macro, millipede, photography, slug, woodlouse
Ok, I was thinking these guys were all very interesting and cute until you came to the centipede. I used to live in a century old home and they liked to come out at night. Boy are they fast…squashing them became a sporting event for us!
Looks good, that white paper trick is great for making stylized shots for stock. If you up the contrast of your photos slightly in PS you’ll find they acquire a little bit more “zing”.
I think most of your experiments turned out okay, especially the centipede. The white paper background allows more detail to be seen than a natural environment would.