Ultimate Antarctica January 5–February 1, 2008

There’s really no excuse for not taking nature photos. Regardless of where you live there are nature subjects and, if you don’t believe me, sit outside and wait. Given time—and usually not much time—a fly, mosquito or some other insect is bound to come to you!

If you consider insects and other arthropods wildlife, and I do, then I’m probably as guilty as anyone of passing up what could be really dynamite wildlife images if I’d only taken the time. “Arthropod” means joint-legged; an inclusive name for a huge variety of animals, including insects, crustaceans and spiders. Each group is defined by unique taxonomic characteristics and is as distinct from the others as birds are from amphibians. We commonly call insects “bugs,” but true bugs are actually an order in the class Insecta, just as dragonflies, butterflies, beetles and bees are all distinct groups or Orders. Spiders belong to a different group of arthropods, called arachnids. Lobsters, crayfish, and crabs belong to another group, the crustacea. Well, enough biology, but it’s important to know the differences when we’re discussing our photography subjects!

You don’t have to go far to find wildlife subjects if you think small—insects and spiders are virtually everywhere!

This past summer I vowed to take advantage of every shooting opportunity as it arose in our gardens and woods, whether it was a flower, a mushroom, a bird or a “bug.” An easy vow to make, but surprisingly, it was also an easy vow to keep—and one that rewarded me with some great images.

To facilitate keeping this vow I kept a macro rig permanently at the ready. Usually, I’d have a 100mm f/2.8 macro lens attached to my camera, with a twin-light macro flash mounted to the lens ring. When I’d find something, I’d grab the system, turn on the camera and flash, and be ready to shoot. Hardly a day passed when I didn’t have an opportunity to photograph something.

Spiders were particularly compelling. While not everyone’s cup of tea, spiders make great subjects, for the group is incredibly diverse. Often when we think of spiders we think of webs, particularly the dramatic, circular webs made by some garden, argiopes and orb-web spiders. Large webs are most common in late summer when adult spiders, hatched earlier in the season, weave their largest webs. There are webs present throughout the summer, if you look, but they’ll generally be small as the spiders making them are immature.

Orb-web spiders often weave their webs at night and black backgrounds are the norm. This spider made its web in a windowpane of our door and, by turning on an interior light and reducing my shutter spped so that the background would register, I eliminated the contrasty background. With digital, this was very easy, as I could check my LCD monitor until I got just the effect I desired.

Webs are most easily spotted in the early morning before the day’s breezes destroy the spider’s nightly work. Backlighted, webs will glisten with dew on favorable days. On most dewy mornings the first few minutes after sunrise are critical as you may only have a few minutes before the softest zephyr ruins any possibility for a shot. Dew settles best on clear nights but the trade-off is how quickly breeze-producing thermals are generated after the sun rises on clear mornings.

Many spiders are active at night and place their webs around outdoor lights to capture insects and moths attracted to the lights. Obviously, flash is required at night, but flash can produce a contrasty image where the spider and web stand starkly against a black background. When possible, I either align my subject against a lighter background—an illuminated wall, for example, or I’ll use a second flash to illuminate the background. Some spiders do not use webs. Perhaps the most common of these are the wolf spiders which, as their name implies, hunt by chasing or, more correctly, pouncing, upon their prey. You can find wolf spiders at night if you hold a flashlight by your eye and watch for the spider’s reflecting eye shine. Spider eyes glow various colors—gold, blue, amber—and it’s surprising how far away you can spot even a tiny, quarter-inch spider by its eye shine.

Crab spiders are extremely well camouflaged. It pays to look closely inside each flower to spot one of these colorful little spiders.

Study flowers carefully and you might spot a well-camouflaged crab spider. The first one I ever saw I found by accident, when I noticed a small bee moving oddly inside a flower, trapped in the jaws of a crab spider. Crab spiders are incredibly cryptic as they sit patiently either on the flower head or beneath a petal, stealthily creeping up on their prey when an insect visits their flower.

Jumping spiders leap upon their prey, sometimes trailing a strand of silk that acts like a safety rope should they fall. Jumping spiders have huge, prey-locating eyes and many are extremely colorful, glowing brightly in metallic shades. They’re most commonly seen stalking along the walls of buildings but they are equally common, if less easily spotted, in tall grasses and weeds.

Spiders hunt along waterways and ponds as well. The six-spotted fishing spider takes advantage of the surface tension of water to literally skate across a pond surface. Like the jumping and wolf spiders, fishing spiders pounce with lightning speed upon their prey, which may include small amphibians like recently metamorphosed tree frogs, as well as various surface-dwelling aquatic insects.

To photograph spiders and insects in the field I use a tripod whenever I can. If I must handhold, either because I’m pressed for time (a poor excuse, photographers!) or because the subject is in a difficult position for placing my tripod, flash should freeze any motion I introduce through handholding the rig. With my twin-light flashes the flash duration is very fast at short working distances, and if the exposure is based solely upon the flash I should have no movement.

While using a tripod can be a headache, the rewards are worth it. With a sturdily mounted camera I can sweep my edges for distractions, confirm critical focus and, if desired, I can choose between an exposure based solely on flash, or daylight, or a combination of the two. For tripod work I’m more likely to use my 180mm macro lens, which provides the same magnification as my 100mm macro but at nearly twice the working distance.

Using TTL flash and ignoring the ambient light will result in properly exposed subject and a black background. By reducing my shutter speed, I can reveal the ambient light of early morning behind the grasshopper, while still using flash to illuminate the backlighted subject. A rock-steady tripod and a motionless subject are imperative at the slow shutter speeds this may require.

To help in focusing I’ll often add a Really Right Stuff (www.reallyrightstuff.com) focusing slider (see archived article Gearing Up for Macro Photography) or their bi-directional geared focusing rail, which allows me to make minor, incremental adjustments to my working distance without moving the tripod. This can be critically important with spider webs and dew-covered insects at dawn, because it’s very easy to bump a plant and shake off the dew with an improperly positioned tripod leg. With the focusing sliders and focusing rails I can fine-tune my composition and adjust the image size with much less risk.

When I’m using my 180mm macro I’ll often mount two Wimberley (www.tripodhead.com) Macro Combos (see archived article Gearing Up for Macro Photography) for my twin-lights, which provides an extremely versatile lighting arrangement. The Wimberley system mounts onto a lens plate, and for ease of use I mount mine onto the Really Right Stuff focusing slider which slips into my tripod head’s quick release mount. By the way, this rig is the best I’ve found for photographing subjects in a home aquarium, as I can adjust the flashes to provide natural-looking lighting without the risk of catching reflections.

While I normally shoot my insects and spiders in the field, sometimes I’ll use a sweep net to capture specimens at random. A sweep net differs from a butterfly net by having a reinforced cloth lining along the net’s metal rim. A traditional butterfly net would quickly wear along the rim if dragged through high grasses and weeds. Sweep nets don’t and, provided you don’t accidentally snag one on an unseen briar or thorn, they generally last several seasons. Sweep nets are for serious bug collectors, so don’t expect to find one at your local hobby or pet store. Do a Google or Yahoo search for “sweep nets” and order yours on-line.

You never know what you’ll find by sweeping, but chances are multiple sweeps or drags will result in several dozen different insects and spiders. In truth, most will probably be too small to shoot, although if you have sufficient magnification even the smallest arthropod makes a fantastic subject. Digital shooters have an added advantage, for a lens that focuses to 1:1 (on a 35mm film camera or a digital camera with a full-frame sensor) may go to 1.6X with a digital camera with a smaller sensor.

You’ll have to place your captured subjects on an appropriate prop—inside a net isn’t too aesthetic. I usually set up captured insects in my studio where I can control the lighting and the background. Backgrounds are very important, adding realism to the studio setup, and it's important that they are illuminated properly. And that is an issue, as a background that’s some distance from your subject may be completely underexposed if you’re doing close-up work and using a TTL flash.

You will have a black background if the background is further from the subject than your flash is from the subject. If that's the case, you may need to place a background closer to the subject or you may need to illuminate that background with a second flash.

Dark backgrounds are due to light fall off, which can be easily explained by the Inverse Square Law, which states that as you double the distance from a light source you quarter the quantity of light. This is especially important with macro subjects where your working distance is short and even a comparatively small linear distance may double or even triple the flash to subject distance. For example, if you have a TTL flash 12” from your subject and the background is 12” behind it, that’s twice the distance and you’ll lose two stops of light. If your TTL exposure is set for f/22, the exposure for the subject might be correct but the background will be two stops darker—and that’s nearly featureless black! This discrepancy in exposure increases the further a background is placed, so to illuminate the background I’ll use a second flash.

Backgrounds for studio insect work need not be elaborate. I often use a plain sky-blue or green poster board. On occasion I’ve used my digital camera to snap some out-of-focus field or flower scenes, then printed an 8x10 or 16x20 background with matte paper on my inkjet printer. Virtually any flower shot you have in file can work to create an out-of-focus background, provided you can get a digital file of that image into Photoshop to apply some Gaussian Blur filter.

One of the most exciting aspects of studio insect work is capturing my subjects in flight. Katydids, grasshoppers, praying mantids and various beetles often hop, leap or fly when they come to the end of a stick or twig and, if you’re focused in the right spot, you might get lucky. While it might be possible to react quickly enough to snap an image as a praying mantis launches into the air, most insects are simply too fast. To capture these, you’ll need some type of electronic triggering system.

A fast flash duration of 1/15,000^th will freeze a flying mantid, a katydid or a jumping grasshopper. The trick is positioning the tripping device in the insect's unpredicatble path.

While several products are available—and a handyperson might be able to build one—my favorite camera-triggering device is the Phototrapper (www.phototrap.com) (see archived article Camera Traps—Take a Rest, the camera’s working). This unit can use a variety of different triggering devices but my favorite, for insects, is the laser trigger which emits a visible red laser beam for extremely precise positioning. The beam can be adjusted for brightness and sensitivity so that even an insect’s antennae can fire a camera, but the real trick is placing the beam in the path of a flying subject. That is not easy.

Generally, whenever I attempt to catch insects in flight I’ll collect several specimens in the hope that one will be an active flier. It is amazing how differently individuals act, with some absolutely refusing to fly, others flying erratically, and a few—a precious few—flying on a rather predictable flight path. For these, I’ll place my beam a few inches ahead of their expected route, and then prefocus at a point beyond the beam to take into account the camera’s lag time.

Lag time is the length of time from the moment an electrical signal is generated to the time the camera actually fires. With many cameras this lag time is 1/30th of a second or so, which is long enough for many insects to jump or fly past your frame. If you’re shooting digital it’s fairly easy to correct for this with subsequent attempts, since you can adjust after each shot. With film, that’s not possible, unless you have access to some pretty speedy developing.

Don’t expect to stop a flying insect using natural light and a fast shutter speed, unless you are willing to sacrifice any possible depth of field. If you want to stop the action and still have maximum depth of field, you’ll need flash, and the faster the flash duration the better if you hope to stop all motion. With TTL it is impossible to predict exactly what a particular flash duration will be, so I normally use manual flash units where I can select a particular flash duration. The Fotronix flashes (www.fotronix.com) I prefer have a flash duration of 1/15,000th of a second and a high guide number, and at three feet I’ll have an aperture of f/16 or so. Even little Sunpak 383s or your Nikon or Canon hotshot flashes have sufficiently fast flash durations when they’re set at a low power ratio, but their guide numbers are low as well and small apertures can only be used when the flash is fairly close to the subject (see archived article Picking a Flash Unit).

Regardless of how you shoot insects or spiders, day or night, indoors or out, you’ll find more subjects and opportunities than you’ll possibly have time for. And, the more you look, the more you’ll find and, if you let yourself, virtually every day could be involved with some type of insect or spider shooting project. Great fun, but you may never find time to mow the grass!