Our old friend Piotr Naskrecki, biologist, naturalist, and crack photographer (photo page here, website here), has an article at Cognisys about how he set up a portable studio in the field to photograph bats—and other animals—in flight.
Piotr has apparently been spending most of his time at Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique, and I’ve featured a lot of his photos from there. This time, a fellow biologist asked him to help photograph bats in flight. Piotr gives a huge amount of information about how he set up his portable studio, but I’ll let the photo buffs go see that for themselves, and I’ll reproduce only one paragraph in favor of the stunning bat and insect photos:
The biologist documenting Gorongosa bats, Jen Guyton of Princeton University, required images that were not only technically good but also taxonomically diagnostic. This means that they needed to show all the details of the bats’ bodies that allow for positive identification of the species. This requirement made me decide to photograph them in a studio setup, rather than attempting to shoot them in caves or at roosting sites. Since Jen was catching bats in a mist net almost every night to take measurements and DNA samples I knew that I would have no shortage of subjects. The difficulty was that the bat documentation was taking place in multiple, often very remote locations in Gorongosa, and thus I had to be able to photograph the animals in the field, far from access to electricity and other amenities of civilization. I had to build a photo studio portable enough to be able to take with me wherever the biologists were working, yet capable of capturing images of the highest quality.
The studio:
The bats (these are all copyrighted, but I have permission from Piotr to use his photos):
And one insect:
The species above has the common name of Lesne’s Oblong-eyed Katydid. I have to say that the animals in this post have cool names!
Those are wonderful! Thanks!
Those are great. Kudos, Piotr.
Very cool. I wish I knew how to freeze motion like that. Is that done by have a very fast flash?
Right. You can do this with a DSLR and remote flash(sold separately). I think the method is to use a normal camera exposure of 60th of a second with a small aperture. This would provide a very underexposed image with ambient light. The electronic flash (1000ths of a second) is synchronized such that it occurs when the shutter is all the way open. The flash can use a metering detector to obtain correct exposure.
It looks like these bats are alive when photographed, is that correct? How are they kept on that white board? What am I missing?
Great photographs. I would be curious what the EXIF info is as well (settings).
Read the link to the article on Cognisis. It goes into the technique (a tour de force) in detail.
Thanks. Those pictures are amazing.
Brilliant technical feat, and the photographic rewards are nonpareil.
Sub
Katy lied.
Let’s not and say we did.
Beautiful pictures! Bats are fascinating mammals (or birds if you believe Leviticus 11:13-19).
Nice – A little illustration of convergent evolution at the end.
Beautiful Photographs.
Fantastic work!