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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Posted 3 months, 3 weeks ago at 5:22 am. Add a comment
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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Posted 1 year, 9 months ago at 2:03 pm. 1 comment