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Playing with bugs on flowers

This weekend I finally found the chance to get out and take some pictures, as Saturday was a very nice day.  I wandered around in my backyard for awhile, looking in the normal places, and found nothing that I hadn’t photographed several times already.  The shoot was briefly interrupted as Eitan, Nathan, and I looked for ants that we could put in their ant farm.  They were very into it but the ants we wound up using turned out to be too small as they later escaped.  We found one bigger ant, but since we couldn’t find any friends for him we let him go in place of the smaller and more plentiful ones.

After satisfying the kids’ ant curiosity, I began to think about choosing better backgrounds for some of the insects.  As we have a number of flowers in bloom, I decided to try that out.  My first subject was an earwig that I found.

Unfortunately my first experiment didn’t work out at all.  As Nelya acutely observed, earwigs ‘freak out’ when you get near them.  Earwigs feel safe underneath something and definitely feel exposed out in the open.  Therefore the top of a flower was not the ideal place and it quickly wiggled away.  Eventually I gave up and let it go about its business.

I decided to try something easier and quickly settled on a rolled up pillbug that I found.  For a background, I chose a yellow primrose that looked large enough to hold it.

Admittedly, the shot isn’t very interesting.  Perhaps yellow was a poor choice, but more likely the case is a rolled up pillbug (also called a roly-poly) isn’t the most interesting subject.  I waited patiently and soon it unrolled and figured out where it was.

Again, I think this picture suffers from the fact that the subject isn’t that interesting.  A bit more interesting was what happened when the pillbug attempted to get down from the primrose.

I like this shot much better than those where it is on the primrose, showing sometimes the best shot isn’t the exact one you thought of.  I thought of trying to get more shots like this, but I figured I had annoyed the pill bug enough and let it go on its way.  They are rather common in the yard so I could have gotten another one, but I’m happy with the shot I got.

My next subject was a spider that I found behind a bag of dirt.  This type of spider is very common around our yard.  I think it is called a sac spider as the eye arrangement matches the books.  I found a nice purple and yellow primrose and set it on there.  Luckily, the spider was very patient that day for getting shots.

I’m not sure which shot I like better.  This one or one I got of it at an angle.

The angled shot follows the rule of thirds a bit better, though the purple part of the flower maybe takes a bit from the spider.  I showed both shots to Nelya and she said both were good shots, but don’t dare ever hang one on the wall.

Overall I think the experiment was successful, as these shots look a bit better than the standard spider shots I usually get.  Now if I can just find a nice looking crab spider I can really get a nice shot.

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Tags: flower, insect, macro, photography, pillbug, primrose, spider