Swamp island macro pt 12: My favorite guy

These are two of my absolute favorite shots from the weekend in the archipelago. It’s a tiny bug of the same species as in my previous post, but I found this little guy inside another flower. He was walking around on one of the petals of the flower, and I got the feeling that he was looking for something. I snapped a whole bunch of not very impressive shots while he was walking around, but it wasn’t until he ended up at the edge of the petal that I managed to get these shots. Even though he’s just a 5 mm long insect I think he manages to look like he’s really thinking about where to go next. I also like the contrast between the darker purple background and the bright green bug.

Settings pic 1-3: F11, 1/160 sec, ISO 400, macro 1:1
Lens: Olympus OM 50mm F1.8 + Vivitar 2X macro converter
Flash: Metz 36 AF-5
Camera: Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH2
Adjustments: Lightroom

Swamp island macro pt 11: Alive, on the edge

I’ve looked a lot of macro shots of insects the last couple of weeks, and it seems like there are basically two very different of categories of shooting out there. One where they shoot dead, frozen or sleeping insects (ending up with photos that are technically perfect) and one where they look for and shoot insect in the wild (where you get to see them in action). While I really like to look at a shot of a super magnified insect with 100% perfect focus I have to say that I actually prefer the ones where you see the insect where it’s really meant to be. Crawling around somewhere, minding its own business. Like the guy below, who seems to be sitting on the edge thinking about where to go next. It tells a little story, and I think that makes it more interesting.

Settings: F16, 1/160 sec, ISO 500, macro 1:1
Lens: Olympus OM 50mm F1.8 + Vivitar 2X macro converter
Flash: Metz 36 AF-5
Camera: Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH2
Adjustments: Lightroom

Swamp island macro pt 10: Teeny-tiny spiders

These guys where by far the smallest ones I shot. They look kind of big here, but both spiders are probably no more than 3mm long. The top one was sitting on a wall, and the bottom one was crawling around on a small flower.

Settings pic 1: F11, 1/160 sec, ISO 400, macro 1:1
Settings pic 2: F16, 1/160 sec, ISO 500, macro 1:1
Lens: Olympus OM 50mm F1.8 + Vivitar 2X macro converter
Flash: Metz 36 AF-5
Camera: Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH2
Adjustments: Lightroom

Swamp island macro pt 9: Linslus

This green and tiny little guy landed on my left hand while I was chasing a dragonfly, and since I was already holding the camera I snapped a couple of shots before he took off again. He had such a curious look that I decided to post these photos here even though focus isn’t perfect.

Settings pic 1 & 2: F16, 1/160 sec, ISO 500, macro 1:1
Lens: Olympus OM 50mm F1.8 + Vivitar 2X macro converter
Flash: Metz 36 AF-5
Camera: Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH2
Adjustments: Lightroom

Swamp island macro pt 8: Sucking, H.R. Giger style

One final photo of the fly with the yellow face, and in this pic I caught him sucking on a flower. If you enlarge the image (by clicking on it) you can see that this fly’s tongue (or feeding tube or whatever it’s called) is like something from a creepy H.R. Giger painting. That’s a real life biomechanical organ right there.

Settings pic 1-3: F16, 1/160 sec, ISO 500, macro 1:1
Lens: Olympus OM 50mm F1.8 + Vivitar 2X macro converter
Flash: Metz 36 AF-5
Camera: Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH2
Adjustments: Lightroom

Swamp island macro pt 7: Lord of the flies

Back once again with pics of a fly, and this time it’s a pretty odd one with a weird yellow face. This guy was extremely hard to shoot since he was constantly jumping and flying around all over the place, put I managed to capture him in a few shots that I’m fairly satisfied with. One thing I didn’t realise until several days after I shot the fly was that my external flash is reflected in the eyes of the fly in the top pic. Kind of looks like he’s watching TV.

Settings pic 1-3: F16, 1/160 sec, ISO 500, macro 1:1
Lens: Olympus OM 50mm F1.8 + Vivitar 2X macro converter
Flash: Metz 36 AF-5
Camera: Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH2
Adjustments: Lightroom

Swamp island macro pt 6: Weird and wonderful beasts

Nature is freaky and fantastic, and full of weird and wonderful beasts. At least when you get close enough. Let’s call these guys Emerald behemoth, Moustached nibbler-ant and Skinny horrorshow.

Settings pic 1 & 3: F16, 1/160 sec, ISO 500, macro 1:1
Settings pic 2: F11, 1/160 sec, ISO 400, macro 1:1
Lens: Olympus OM 50mm F1.8 + Vivitar 2X macro converter
Flash: Metz 36 AF-5
Camera: Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH2
Adjustments: Lightroom

Swamp island macro pt 5: Full frontal

Since the dragonflies were cool enough to let me poke both camera and flash in their freaky faces I took the opportunity to play around with some different angles. I think the angle in my previous post is more interesting since you see more of the the head and body, but these full frontal ones are also pretty fun. The top one is a red dragonfly that was pretty nervous and harder to shoot, and the bottom one is the same yellow and green one that I posted yesterday.

Settings pic 1 & 2: F16, 1/160 sec, ISO 500, macro 1:1
Lens: Olympus OM 50mm F1.8 + Vivitar 2X macro converter
Flash: Metz 36 AF-5
Camera: Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH2
Adjustments: Lightroom

Swamp island macro pt 4: Chasing the dragon(fly)

Allright, enough with the flies already and over to something bigger and more exciting. Dragonflies are insects that I rarely get to see, and when I’ve seen them I’ve never had a camera around. Before last weekend that is. The archipelago is apparently full of dragonflies, but even though there were a lot of them everywhere they were zooming around so much that it felt nearly impossible to catch one. It turned out though that even dragonflies need to rest every now and then, and I found a field with really high grass behind the house where a lot of them touched down. I was kind of bummed to realise that the dragonflies got freaked out when I came crashing through their landing field, but it seems like dragonflies are creatures of habit, and after having fled they quickly returned to the straw they were sitting on. As long as I was standing still or moved very slowly the dragonflies didn’t seem to notice me, and the one you see below didn’t even care that I fired my flash in his face from probably less than 10 centimetres. I didn’t know how close I would be able to get, so I started a bit zoomed out and worked my way closer until I was at 1:1. A tactic that payed off.

Settings pic 1-3: F16, 1/160 sec, ISO 500, macro 1:1 – 1:20
Lens: Olympus OM 50mm F1.8 + Vivitar 2X macro converter
Flash: Metz 36 AF-5
Camera: Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH2
Adjustments: Lightroom

Swamp island macro pt 3: Red eye reduction?

This may just be an ordinary, annoying and probably disease spreading housefly, but it’s also one of my favorite photos from my insect session last weekend. It’s nice that I managed to get the focus over the fly’s head and body, but I think the best parts are the angle, making it look like the fly is looking for something, and the green blurry background without any irritating stuff in it. I haven’t done any cropping at all on this one, just some standard adjustments in Lightroom.

Settings pic 1-4: F16, 1/160 sec, ISO 500, macro 1:1
Lens: Olympus OM 50mm F1.8 + Vivitar 2X macro converter
Flash: Metz 36 AF-5
Camera: Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH2
Adjustments: Lightroom