Falling back into my love of macro nature photography, I’ve been challenging myself to take photos of the insects I find in between my various photo experiments. I first found myself interested in this type of photography during my second semester at Marywood University in my Color Photography class with Professor Sue Jenkins.
In these first few frames, I accidentally captured this pollinated ant during a macro flower shoot. During that same spring, I went around Marywood’s campus to find some working bees and captured them feasting on the plentiful flowers at the time. I shot these back in the Spring of 2024 but I’ve updated the edits with the knowledge I have now with Adobe Lightroom Classic. At the time I shot these, I used my Canon 18-55mm lens with a Bower HD Close-UP +10 filter attachment.
Fast forward to more recent works I’ve taken with my Canon Macro Lens EF 100mm, I was able to capture this beautiful monarch butterfly and a grasshopper. The butterfly was taken in my backyard and was challenging to capture as my lens doesn’t have the autofocus feature working at the moment. I was shooting 1/800 of a sec with an ISO of 200, but looking back I wish I shot a bit quicker to capture much more frames to select from this shy butterfly.
This last photo of a grasshopper sitting on a wildflower was taken on a recent photo adventure I went on along Onomea Bay. In contrast to the butterfly, the grasshopper seemed relatively calm when I was shooting him and I was grateful given the steep hillside we were parked along. For this last frame, I shot at 1/1250 of a second with an ISO of 800.
The biggest takeaway I’ve learned by far is shooting at a relatively high shutter speed to capture these fast-moving critters and having a bunch of patience. While I do like having the control of manual focusing, it definitely helps with the autofocus so there’s less room for error and a higher chance of capturing a solid image when there’s no stable foundation. I hope to both revisit some of these projects in the near future and find some new critters along the way to capture. It’s always fascinating to capture these guys in their own elements and then going into post production to edit them in both the most accurate way and highlight their natural features/colors. What’s your favorite insect? Adíos!
~Conchita (@/conchita.creates on Instagram and Tiktok 🙂 )