562 - A Grumpy Old Bug



Remember that I bought a macro flash kit last year? Well, mostly I don’t use it. For the kind of photography that I tried on Sunday, images of live insects in the grass, you need tons of images. I shot about a hundred images in this session, and most of them are either not sharp enough, sharp in the wrong places, have leaves of grass in awkward places or are simply compositionally bad. With these critters it’s a little bit like press photography: you can anticipate what the subjects are going to do, but only once in a while you get a truly good expression, a pope caught up by the wind in his own garment or a stumbling president. Well, I even suppose that insects are worse. They move extremely fast, at least considering the scale, and you simply have no control at all.

Anyway, patience is the name of the game, and this is how I got this unfriendly guy, bitching at me. They are really cute from a distance, but looking right into their faces, you can imagine where Giger’s design for the Ridley Scott classic “Alien” came from 🙂

The Song of the Day is “Bugs” from the 2002 Lambchop album “Is a Woman”. No video on YouTube, sorry.