CalevPhoto

The Mighty Mite

I remember as a (slightly abnormal) kid collecting firecracker packs having a pack called ‘Mighty Mite’.  At the time, it never really occurred to me what a ‘mite’ was – I just collected the pack.

It isn’t difficult to find mites whenever taking macro shots.  They are everywhere and you really just have to turn over a leaf that is decaying on the ground to find one.  Photographing one, though.  Well that’s a different story.

Complicating getting a good photo of one of these little buggers are two things.

1) They are extremely small.  The shot above was taken at 5x – and even then I cropped it.

2) They move rather quickly and do not sit still

About a week ago, though, after not finding much anything else to photograph that day, I decided to take my chances.

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How to photograph flies

When I first started taking macro photographs, I thought for sure that all closeup shots of flies were fake.  How could they get the fly to stay still for so long?  After a number of failed experiments, I finally managed to get my first fly shot.  After that, I slowly figured out the hard way how to get closeup pictures of flies, which I now do rather often.  Once you learn how it’s done, it’s really not overly difficult.

I take most of my fly images with my MP-E 65.  Once in awhile I use my 180L but I like the larger size of the fly that I can achieve with magnifications higher than 1x.  Of course, this requires that I get even closer to the fly.  When I use my 180L, it is much easier to get shots but I tend not to like them as much unless it happens to be a large fly.  For lighting, I always use a MT-24EX.  For the most part, taking high quality pictures of insects with only ambient light is not practical.

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