Fully into summer now, with plenty of wild flowers blooming and insects of all kinds out and about. A recent hike at the Tolleston Dunes turned into a bugfest. Both literally in terms of the mosquitos, and photographically. When it comes to getting closeup shots of insects it helps to have a telephoto lens with a high magnification factor, that way you can get great images without having to be so close that you frighten off your subject.
The image at the top of this post was the last photograph I took that day. Near the upper left hand corner there is a Weevil, which looks like a beetle with a vacuum hose attachment where the face should be. I like how it appears as if the flower just above it is prepared pounce on the insect.
You would think that a green fly, on a green plant, with a green background would be difficult to spot. But the metallic sheen of this “Long Legged” fly makes it hard to miss. The metallic appearance is actually a diffraction effect.It is hard to miss brilliant orange Butterfly Weed. This rather large hornet had the whole plant all to itself. Another reason for long focal length macro lenses, you are less likely to get stung.And of course, Butterfly Weed attracts butterflies as well as hornets.The harry, spiky beast on the right is a Plume Moth. First time I’ve ever seen one. Nature always has something new to discover, the more you look the more you see.This is not another hornet, or bee. It is actually a Hover Fly. The eyes and wings give it away.Lately I have been practicing taking photographs of insects in flight. A lot of flys, bees, etc. can be challenging to get clear photographs of because they are constantly moving about. If you spend enough time watching, you will notice that some species tend to buzz and hover about the same flower, or patch of flowers. In these situations it is not too hard to catch them in flight between brief landings. The key is to bump your shutter speed as high as you can, sacrificing aperture and ISO in order to freeze their motion.The little white bump on this Black Eyed Susan. Look close (click on the image to view it full size) and you will see the rear end of a spider just to the left of what is its egg sac. I don’t think this particular spider choose a good location. The flower is right on the edge of the trail and the egg sac is in a very visible location.
For day two of my camping trip I spent the afternoon out on the Great Marsh Trail. It had rained the night before and most of the morning so all of the vegetation was coated with water when I arrived. By definition a marsh is a pretty wet and moist environment, and after a good soaking rain it is even more so. Pretty much the perfect conditions for this sort of trail, in my opinion. As the image above shows, the slugs pretty much agreed with me, though this one was trying to hide behind a leaf.
A fairly typical stretch of the trail. It was impossible to pass through without getting your pants soaked from all the wet grasses that crowd in on the trail. Synthetic materials are great for this because they dry out so fast. So even though my pants were soaked through by the end of this stretch, they dried out pretty fast and were not uncomfortable.When I began to really get into nature photography I did not think of grasses as being particularly interesting subject matter. But they have turned into one of my favorites. They mostly lack the spectacular colors of a lot of wild flowers. But I find their patterns, textures and details to be truly fascinating.It is not easy to get a straight on head shot with most flys. They tend to bug out if you spend much time positioning the camera. This fella did not seem to mind my antics and he sat still long enough to get shots from several angles.Bees can also be difficult to get clear photographs of. Even when they are working on a flower they are constantly twisting and turning. I have found that I keeping shutter speed high makes it much easier, even when doing so means using suboptimal ISO and aperture settings. Photography is a game of tradeoffs. Learning how to balance competing factors is part of the learning process.This is a good time of year for Lilies. The Great Marsh trail has a very nice patch of these beautiful orange one’s just past the observation deck.Water drops and filamentary plant fibers make a great combination. To me this image looks like interconnected neurons in the brain. There are many patterns in nature which appear in very different ways at vastly different size scales. I have seen very similar patterns of voids surrounded by filamentary structures in models of the distribution of galaxies throughout the universe. Just one of the many ways in which I find nature to be endlessly fascinating.
