Reader Lou Jost, a biologist who lives in Ecuador, took a walk, and I’ll show his photos today and tomorrow.
A few weeks ago I took a walk in our Rio Anzu Reserve, in the Amazon basin, to test some macro photography techniques. The insect diversity and abundance was overwhelming; it was like the African savannah in miniature.
I had heard of carnivorous katydids but knew nothing else about them, so I was excited to find one of these munching on the remains of its kill, an aposematic stick insect. Sitting quietly on the same plant was another stick insect, missing a leg in a previous battle with this or some other predator.
While the predator feasted on its kill, little vulture-like flies came in to take their share of the carcass. The katydid kept flicking them away with its front legs, but the scavengers were only a minor annoyance for it.
There were herbivorous grasshoppers too. Some were very colorful, and some were carrying parasites, tiny mites.
While I was photographing grasshoppers a jumping spider came to check me out with way too many eyes.
Life, and the remains of things once alive, was everywhere here. I found a sparkling Morpho butterfly wing on the forest floor, and began to photograph it using a focus-stacking technique. This technique gets around the shallow depth of field inherent in macrophotography, by taking many different pictures focused on different planes of the subject, and then combining the sharp parts of all the shots into a single picture that is sharp throughout.
While I was doing the shooting, things kept landing and on me and/or crawling on the forest floor. One vicious-looking ant with enormous jaws walked right across the Morpho wing as I photographed it.
Beautiful and interesting! I think the ant is Anochetus, a “trap-jaw” ant (I crossed them somehere on the web, unfortunately never in the real world).
Lou, how do you do focus stacking in the field ? Tripod, rail and light ? Till now I used it only indoor on dead animals.
Good call on the ant! Thanks.
I can only do “light” stacking handheld, two or three images, but that is often all it takes. I used a tripod and remote hand-held flash (wirelessly triggered by the camera’s built-in flash) for the ant and the morpho wing. No rail—with a bridge camera you can stack with the camera stationary, using the manual focus. And on my camera (Panasonic FZ300) that focusing can even be done by wireless remote control through my smart phone.
It’s a hard world for little things.
Fascinating. How I’d love to explore the Amazon with a camera!
Wonderful shots!🐛🕷
Great photos, Lou! I took your earlier advice and bought a Raynox 150 lens. Preliminary indoor tests are good, but I will know more when the weather warms up and I can get outside with it.
I hope you find it useful. Remember, they are best on long lenses, like 100-200mm. If you have a bridge camera (as I used here) it really works wonders with a small sensor and long lens.
I just bought the ‘ol Canon 100-300mm L series lens (my 1st L!), and it is fun using it in the house with the Raynox. I also have a 100mm prime lens that gets no love b/c its an off-off-off brand Fd mount. But I recently found it has a surprisingly good working distance on extension tubes. I will try it out with the Raynox when I get a chance.
Just noticing some details here. The two walking sticks have different colors, and I am wondering if they were a mating pair before the katydid broke up their party.
Also, there is a caste skin of what looks like an Orthopteran next to the morpho wing.
Great call on the orthopteran. I should have played “Spot the…”. I actually only saw it when I was back at home working on the photos.
Isn’t it also possible that the two stick insects are separate species? There seem to be morphological differences as well.
I at first thought they were dimorphic mates, but now I don’t think so. They are VERY different. But I am not an entomologist.
I have a vague recollection of seeing two of the red and black ones mating years ago, which would mean they aren’t dimorphic and these must be different species.
I never would have thought that such an animal as a carnivorous katydid existed!
Lou, how did you get such detail in compound/lots of eyes? I never understand how people are successful photographing moving insects in such up close detail like that!
Diana, the key is to use flash, and to make it look natural by diffusing it heavily. Flash freezes motion, both the bug’s movements and my shaky hands. In the hand-held shots here, I use the camera’s pop-up flash, but I use a piece I cut out of a translucent plastic bottle to diffuse the light. The plastic sits on the tip of the lens. In fact the lens shadow would block the flash light if there were no diffuser. I learned this technique from Andreas Kay, who has sometimes had his pictures posted here on WEIT.
My goals for getting a good picture are too long to list here, but among them is to get the nearest eye in focus (getting the facets to resolve is a high plus), and to get at least one nearby foot in focus to ‘ground’ the insect in the composition. You are absolutely right about using a diffused flash. That makes getting facets much more probable.
Ah yes. I always forget about flash. I fantasize about a ring flash just because it’s simple but I’m also too cheap yet unskilled enough that even using bracket mounts become intimidating.
I’m not using anything fancy, most were taken with the built-in pop-up flash, no brackets or anything. Homemade plastic diffuser. You can do great macro with most cheap compact pocket-size cameras. When in difficult places, I carry a $100 camera and a tube I cut from a PVC pipe. That tube fits over a bump on the camera-lens joint. I put the Raynox close-up lens ($55-70) on the end of the plumbing tube (it won’t go on the square lens opening of this cheap camera) along with a plastic diffuser cut from a bottle. The pictures are excellent. You don’t need much money to do this (though top quality does require some investment in good lenses).
“I never would have thought that such an animal as a carnivorous katydid existed!”
My thought exactly.
I remember as a child I had collected a bunch of large walkingsticks. I was very excited about this find. I put them into a large tupperware container, with oak leaves (that was the usual food of this species). After a day I checked on them and found to my horror that they cannibalized each other. Only one of them was intact. Never trust an herbivore. That was the lesson I learned that day!
Nice anecdote…the environment has the greatest influence on animal behavior. As others have said, it’s tough to be small on this planet. Do you think the closed and small system brought out the survival program? I’m hesitant to say ‘survival of the fittest’ but that is what seems to have happened in your Tupperware world.
Nature — red in tooth & claw … and arthropod mandible, too.
Wow, Lou, those are terrific! And from context, I’m inferring that these are “live” shots, no refrigerating the critters to slow them down. Double wow.
Would you care to comment more on your technique and equipment? I’m particularly interested in lenses used and magnifications that you’re getting for these.
I know most people don’t care so long as the photos are outstanding, but a few of us photographic nerds try to learn wherever we can.
Thanks for the kind words!
Macro photography really benefits from knowing something about optics and lenses and how they work, because you are pushing up against some nasty laws of physics (eg diffraction due to the wave nature of light) when you try to get everything in focus at high magnification. So my main advice is to understand the principles, then you can easily wade through the often-contradictory advice and figure out what you really need.
Great place to start, which I’ve mentioned before here, is this forum:
http://www.photomacrography.net/forum/
Look up the technical articles, especially those by Rik Littlefield.
I took all these pictures with a small lightweight bridge camera that has a very high-quality long telephoto lens built into it. Panasonic FZ300. I attached a very good snap-on close-up lens (Raynox 150 or 250 depending on magnification). And I mostly used the built-in flash, well-diffused by a piece of plastic, as I explained above. For some shots I used a tripod, which always helps the technical quality of the image but is usually too slow to catch action.
One trick I am still investigating is to record video with this camera, slowly changing the focus point, and then focus-stack from frames taken out of the video.
There are lots of other tricks. Stitching photos is an amazing technique which opens new horizons in macro work. Telecentric lenses are another trick. You can read up on this on the forum I mentioned.
Some numbers for you: the max focal length of the lens is about 100mm, sensor is 9mm, and with the Raynox 250 I could fill the sensor with an object that is 7 mm long, with a working distance of 11 or 12 cm.
If you want more magnification than that, you can put a microscope objective on the camera instead of the Raynox close-up lens. Then you can get cellular-level detail.
Fascinating shots all. That Morpho wing with the ant looks like woven fabric. Blue in terrestrial nature is probably my favorite color as it seems quite rare, and the blues can be electric as seen here.
I couldn’t spy any mites on the grasshopper and the photo wouldn’t enlarge.
That one didn’t have mites, sorry…I think I forgot to send the one with mites.
Wow, spectacular shots! Incredible color on the morpho wing! Diabolical katydid for sure! 😀
What does the abdomen sticking out from under the katydid belong to?
The concept of an aposematic stick insect is delightfully contradictory. 🙂
That’s part of the prey’s body, along with some little flies under the katydid.
Yes, there aren’t many bright red-and-black sticks in the forest. These guys are really toxic. They shoot volatile liquid out of their leg joints. I sniffed one once and nearly choked from the resulting coughing.