Fuzzy Shoulder Pads are So Hot Right Now

Back to the bugs!

Violet found this guy on the outside stairs at the Muskoka cottage, and thought it looked like a bee. I'm pretty sure it's some sort of scarab beetle or hairy scavenger beetle. I have not had luck specifically identifying it yet. It was about the size of a dime or smaller.

I do dig the superfly fuzzy shoulder armor, and I think the texture of the shell-like wings is pretty cool, see below. Good colors and nice Turtle Wax too.

Below is a slightly more artsy shot showing some diffraction or chromatic aberration from my janky lens setup. I am intrigued by the beetle's fancy antennae.

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Artsy Insects

I like the shot above because it kind of looks like a cool book cover or a poster for a sci-fi movie about flies taking over the world.

I have several pics of some bugs we saw in Muskoka (Peninsula Lake, to be specific), and decided to start you all off lightly with a couple more artistic, soft photos. We will get to the creepier, crawlier ones, to be sure.

Below is a bee who hung out on a leaf long enough for me to snap a frame or two. I like the soft focus and prismatic colors on the wings.

{CORRECTION: The insect below actually appears to be a type of hoverfly, likely a female Sphaerophoria scripta}

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Critters

Say hello to my little friends.

Here are a few critters I encountered in the wild vegetation of my parents' back yard. If you haven't noticed, the last several posts have been plant related. I snapped lots of material in my recent trip.

The wasp above unfortunately had to be sprayed, since its nest was attached to the deck next to the pool where our girls spent much of their time. In the photo, the wasp is dead. Alive, its antennae would have been extended above its head, not curled down.

The spider below was a little surprise I found under the curled edge of a leaf. I had been shooting a spider web, and came across its foreman, on a snack break. Union workers, sheesh.

At the end of this post is an OOF (Out-Of-Focus) shot of some sort of fly. I've included it because I find it pretty for reasons other than being a good macro/micro photo. I like the softness of the colors and the buttery warm light. And that the fly appears to be made of metal and chrome like a motorcycle or a helmet.

We've seen critters here at Morning Macro before: some kind of butterfly, cicada wings, bizarre tiny creepers and their even smaller buddies, the cicada face, a slug, a teensy tiny snail shell, and a blue dragonfly.

Below are the petals of a clover, those tiny flowers among the grass that bees love so much.

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In Cotton Candy

Copyright ©2009 Adam Saynuk. All rights reserved. This image may not be duplicated, downloaded, reproduced, altered, or printed without permission.

This insect was either a moth or a butterfly of some variety. I'm sorry to say I have not researched his species in preparation for this post.

There were many of these guys flittering around these little pink flowers, which take on the soft fluffy look of cotton candy in this photo. The fuzziness is due to my shooting at the widest possible aperture, and when fully open, the lens has a very shallow depth of field.

This cloud of flowers looks so plush and inviting, no wonder this little guy came in for a rest in them.

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Tiny and Tinier

Copyright ©2009 Adam Saynuk. All rights reserved. This image may not be duplicated, downloaded, reproduced, altered, or printed without permission.

I was shooting some midsummer flowers and found this little insect hanging out on one of the miniature flower stalks. He was maybe about 7mm long, and there were a number of them all over this particular plant. I don't know what they are, but after taking a look at the photos later, I realized how spindly they were.

Another think I noticed was that these flower stalks were covered with another insect as well, these were about .5mm to 1mm each.

You can see one of these little guys in this magnification of a section of the photo. See if you can spot more of them in the larger version at the top of this post. Again, I don't know what they are, but I'm kind of weirded out about them. What if we had taken a cutting from that plant into the house?

Actually, I've found that shooting macro photos of insects has made me far more accepting of them than I had been in the past. Perhaps it's because I have a view of what they are now, and can see what they're made of; the lack of mystery makes them less gross.

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Up In My Grill

Copyright ©2009 Adam Saynuk. All rights reserved. This image may not be duplicated, downloaded, reproduced, altered, or printed without permission.

This guy was a very patient insect, I believe he was a cicada.

I took photos of him from several angles, and like this one a lot. He seems to be staring at us, like the face of a parked truck. He was hanging out on a chain link fence in the middle of summer. The gold flecky stuff on the cicada's "face" is actually tiny little hairs, or something like it. They catch the sunlight in a beautiful gold twinkle.

Shooting things this small is difficult because the depth of field at this level of magnification is very shallow. As you can see in this photo, I only get about a half to a full centimeter of usable focus. This is partially due to my lens setup (a Sigma 18-125 with a Raynox 2.5x macro ring adapter and filter on the front), and partially just the nature of macro photography. Generally speaking, the more light you can get on your subject, the greater amount of depth of field you can gain. But there are limits to everything.

I think I shot this photo with no added flash, so that accounts for part of my problem with the low depth of field.

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