macrophotography
awild | October 2, 2008
Prenolepis imparis - The Winter Ant
Champaign, Illinois
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon 20D
ISO 100, f/13, 1/250 sec, flash diffused through tracing paper
awild | September 30, 2008Phymata ambush bug - Champaign, Illinois
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon 20D
ISO 100, f/13, 1/250 sec, flash diffused through tracing paper
awild | September 26, 2008Popillia japonica - Champaign, Illinois
The ever colorful Popillia japonica has been in North America for nearly a century. In spite of an unmistakable charisma, the charms of this unintentional visitor are largely lost among the ruins of chewed up rose bushes, grape vines, and raspberry plants left in its wake. This beetle is a serious pest, and I don't know many gardeners who have welcomed its spread across the continent.
For those with a camera, however, Japanese beetles are hard-to-resist eye candy. The insects' metallic surfaces render photography a bit tricky, though, as glare…
awild | September 7, 2008In an earlier discussion on the merits of megapixels, commentator and snail guru Aydin notes:
Megapixel counts matter if you need to crop out large sections of an image & still need to retain enough pixels for a large enough print.
To illustrate Aydin's point, I've taken a full photo of an Australian Monomorium nest and cropped it away to show just the queen ant:
Viola! Instant magnification. I can get away with a tight crop because the original photo spans over 6 million pixels. Blog photos only need 100,000 pixels. Plenty of pixels to spare. Once I get my hands on the Canon 50D…
awild | July 17, 2008
Leptogenys attenuata
In spite of the southern winter, the coastal forests of Kwazulu-Natal had plenty of ant activity to keep me occupied last week. In addition to the beautiful Polyrhachis I posted earlier, here are portraits of a few of the species I encountered.
Crematogaster tricolor
Platythyrea cooperi
Myrmicaria natalensis
Plectroctena mandibularis
Anochetus faurei
Oecophylla longinoda (African Tailor Ant)
Cataulacus brevisetosus
Dorylus helvolus
Pachycondyla (Bothroponera) mlanjiensis
Atopomyrmex mocquerysi
Pheidole megacephala (Big-Headed Ant)
Solenopsis geminata (…
awild | July 17, 2008Among the more charismatic ants I saw during my visit to South Africa was a silver Polyrhachis that seemed all too happy to pose for me. With such an unusually cooperative subject, I was able to experiment with several different arrangements of the flash heads on my MT-24EX twin flash. Compare these two shots, differing only in the placement of one of the two heads:
Polyrhachis schlueteri, St. Lucia, KZN, South Africa
The top photo is the clear winner. The MT-24EX has detachable heads, and what I did here was remove one of them and hand-hold it under the leaf, facing upward at the ant.…
awild | June 22, 2008A century ago, William Morton Wheeler inked this iconic illustration of the striking polymorphism displayed among members of an ant colony. You may have seen it; Andrew Bourke and Nigel Franks used it as the cover for their 1995 text Social Evolution in Ants.
I always assumed Wheeler's figure depicted some exotic tropical marauder ant, a voracious jungle species with massive soldiers for slicing up hapless prey. I don't read captions carefully enough, I guess, because I learned recently that this charismatic creature is actually a local harvester ant, Pheidole tepicana. Not only that, but…
awild | May 25, 2008
This basic photo of a harvester ant carrying a seed took an hour and a half to capture. 150 exposures. The problem wasn't that the ants weren't behaving, but that it took nearly an hour of experimentation to get the simplicity of composition I had envisioned when I set out on the project.
Few of my better photos are one-off shots.
Most exist in my head in some form or another before I attempt to shoot them, and once I've started a session they take a bit of experimentation before finding the right conditions. Yesterday I headed up towards Mt. Lemmon where I knew of several nests of the…
awild | March 30, 2008
If you've ever spent time photographing ants the above shot will look familiar: off-frame and out of focus. Because ants are small and speedy, they are among the most difficult insects to photograph. Just capturing an active ant somewhere in the frame can be regarded as an achievement, never mind the more aesthetic concerns of lighting and composition. Yet ants are dominant insects nearly everywhere, and photographers who neglect them are missing out on one of our most important animals. Figuring out how to photograph these tricky insects is well worth the effort. If you can shoot ants,…
awild | February 3, 2008I have thousands of absolutely awful photographs on my hard drive. I normally delete the screw-ups on camera as soon as they happen, but enough seep through that even after the initial cut they outnumber the good photos by at least 3 to 1. Here are a few of my favorite worst shots.
Thinking that nothing would be cooler than an action shot of a fruit fly in mid-air, I spent an entire evening trying to photograph flies hovering over a rotting banana. This shot is the closest I came to getting anything in focus.
That's a nice finger in the background. It's mine, you know.
Imagine how…
awild | December 29, 2007Photos posted to myrmecos.net rarely go straight from the camera to the web. Through some combination of errors related to exposure and the innate properties of digital sensors, raw images can be a surprisingly poor match to what is seen through the viewfinder. Raw images are often relatively flat in appearance, with colors that are shifted or off-hue. For instance, Canon cameras by default impart a warm reddish hue to their files that is especially apparent in macrophotography. The nice thing about raw files, and indeed the main reason for using them, is that they are malleable enough to…
awild | December 13, 2007In an earlier post about flash diffusion, I wrote about camera flash being a necessity of the trade-off between depth of field and shutter speed. Most insect photographers- myself included- work hard to improve the depth of field in our photographs, trying to bring as much of our diminutive subjects into focus as possible. This means we use a lot of flash.
However, that's not the only way to take insect photos. If one is happy to throw depth of field to the wind, one can dispense with the need for flash and produce photos from the ambient light. The effect is dramatic. One doesn't get…
awild | December 9, 2007Flash is a necessary evil in insect photography. This necessity is due to two unfortunate traits shared by most insects: small size and stubborn unwillingness to sit still for the camera. These traits confound each other in a way that renders insect photography uniquely challenging. Small subjects need to be close to the lens, placing them squarely in the zone where depth of field becomes razor-thin. Depth of field can be increased by using a small aperture, but that restricts the amount of light reaching the sensor. With so little light entering the camera, a proper exposure requires…