Note: This essay was originally written in 1999. Since writing it I moved on to taking insect photos on slide film (vs. color print) and then graduated to digital. An updated (May, 2006) insect photography tutorial appears in the site blog. It does not replace this essay, especially on how to stalk insects and the question of WHY shoot bugs, but for digital techniques click here .

- Mark Cassino, May 2006

 

Taking these insect photos was easy. Set the camera to manual mode, shutter speed 1/250th of a second, aperture at f16. Put TTL flash on a macro bracket. Move in towards the subject and let the AF sensor snap the shutter when it's in focus. Viola! Another insect portrait...

Well, that is oversimplifying it a bit. Sort of like saying that playing the piano is simple -- just push the keys and make the notes. There is, of course, a lot more to it and I don't pretend to be an expert. But with every update of this page I outline what I've learned about photography since the last update, so let's take a look at some aspects of insect photography.

Equipment:  I shot these images using a Pentax PZ-1p camera and either a Kiron 105mm macro lens or a Pentax SMCA* 200mm macro.  Both of these lenses focus down to 1:1 without adding extension tubes, and both are excellent performers and deliver crisp, detailed images.  (The SMCA* 200mm is a particularly superb lens.)

Pentax auto focus bodies feature "trap focus" or "snap in focus" when used with manual lenses.  Basically, when the camera is set to AF mode and a manual focus lens is attached, the shutter will not release until the AF sensor picks up something as being in focus.  So you can depress the shutter button and move towards your subject, and when it's in focus the camera triggers automatically.  This is handy if it works compositionally.  The drawback is that you can't let the focus sensor dictate placement of the subject in the lens, and in darker, low contrast situations the sensor may not fire the shutter when you want it to.  This is especially true when using the 200mm f4, which is operating at an effective aperture of about f5.6 when fully extended.  I estimate that I use the trap focusing for about two thirds of these images, and the rest are taken just by firing the shutter when the image is in focus.  I don't know much about other brands of cameras, but I think that this feature is available on other cameras as well.

I usually work with the camera set to a flash synch of 1/250th of a second.   A high-speed synch like this is required to minimize the effects of camera shake, especially when hand holding the 200mm lens.  However, I'm trying to avoid the idea that the faster the flash the better -- just like I'm trying to get away from the idea that more you stop down, the better.  So, depending on the circumstances I'm setting the flash synch at 1/180th or 1/120th of a second.  While having the faster flash synch helps, you can still get good shots at the slower speeds (especially if you stick with a 100mm lens.)  Using a monopod is also an option when working with a slower flash synch, but my personal experience is that they tend to get in the way.

And of course, the subject and conditions under which the photo is taken should determine technique.  So, while these comments are geared towards flash photography -- which is the best technique for fast moving outdoor subjects -- use of a flash is not always needed, and if you can get the shot with a tripod and natural light, all the better.

Flash Brackets:  There are few opportunities for constructing do-it-yourself photographic equipment.  The macro flash bracket is one exception to this. The homemade brackets that I use are cobbled together from metal braces, nuts, bolts, plumbing washers, foam pipe insulation, and of course, duct tape.

Here's a photo of the brackets that I currently use, one with a 105mm macro lens and the other with a 200mm. I bought the materials for these brackets at the local True Value hardware store at a cost of less that $10 per bracket. In these photos the lenses are set to 1:1 magnification, with the fishing fly at the point of focus.

John Shaw, in Close Ups In Nature shows a much more refined and elegant bracket. I could not find the nice materials that he uses in my local hardware store, but his design looks very nice. Paul Hicks, in Photographing Butterflies and Other Insects also shows a simple homemade bracket, and the bracket shown on my 200mm Marco is a direct, albeit crude, copy of the design he shows on page 82 of his book. And of course, you can always buy a commercial macro flash bracket (but probably not for $10!)

At first I thought, "a bracket is a bracket is a bracket" and that design really didn't matter if you got the flash out in front of the lens. In a word -- wrong!

Last year I used a slightly different bracket with the 105mm lens.  It mounted the flash further out from the lens, with the light shining down on the subject, not straight out. Not much light got behind the subject to hit the background, and so the backgrounds were dark. Aligning the flash so that it throws light out at the subject, instead of down on it, made a big improvement in lighting the background. It also make for less pronounced shadows.

On the down side though, having too little angle between the flash and the subject can result in lighting that is too flat, and minimize texture and detail. But I'd still recommend that, if building your own bracket, set it to flash straight out as opposed to out and down at an angle.

Exposure Issues: Didn't I say that the TTL flash controls exposure? What more is there to it? Well -- a lot. Over the last few weeks I've gotten pretty good at looking at mis-exposed images and figuring out what went wrong. (I hope to get good at figuring that stuff out before taking the photos.) Here's the stuff I'm currently working with --

Fist, it's important to know what your equipment can and cannot do.  For example, the 105mm setup I use is pretty limited with slow film (like Kodachrome 25).   One of the first things I did after building my flash brackets was to go into a dark room and run some tests with a gray card to see how far I could stop down at various film speeds and still get a good exposure.  I did this without film in the camera, just by watching the green "exposure good" LED on the flash units.  This gave me a good idea of the absolute maximum amount I could stop down, and still get good exposures.

Of course, in the field you’re shooting with a lot of ambient light.  It seems that the best results come when the flash is balanced with the ambient light, so you are relying on the flash for only one or two stops of light, with the ambient light kicking in the rest.

My starting position for all shots is shutter set to 1/250th, aperture at f16, flash in TTL mode. So let's say you are setup like this with ISO 100 film in the camera, standing next to a hay field. Without even taking a meter reading, the sunny 16 rule tells you that you'd get a correct exposure at f16 and shutter speed of 1/100th of a second. Since you're setup at 1/250th and f16, if you shoot at an insect perched on a grass leaf, the flash will make up for the 1.5 stops of light you need. Let's assume that the background material is a half a meter away. In this case, there will still be enough ambient light to avoid the dark background and create a pleasing bokeh. (And if you construct your bracket to shine directly out, you'll pick up a bit of help from the flash too.)

But then you turn and head into the woods, where it's a lot darker and there is no direct sunlight. A meter reading shows that with the aperture set to f16 you need a shutter speed of 1/60th to get a proper exposure with ambient light. If you use the same settings and shoot at an insect, perhaps on a tree leaf , again with background elements half a meter away, you'll probably get a blown out main subject on a dark black background. The inverse square law clobbers the light from the flash unit that goes past the subject, the ambient light is insufficient to expose much of the film, and the TTL flash just keeps pumping out light until enough is reflected off the only close enough thing -- the subject, which results in it being blown out.

So how do we get a better image? Well, we know that we got good results out in the sun, when the ambient light was fairly close to a correct exposure level, and the flash simply kicked in a little more. The same would work in the shaded forest. So, if you open up to f 11 and slow the shutter to 1/180th, the flash won't kick out as much light, you won't get the blowout, and the background will be lighter... In other words, control your aperture and shutter speed to balance flash and ambient light.

One aspect of exposure that is harder to control is what I call "iridescent blowout." It's probably unique to insect photography, and it looks like this. This is caused by the highly reflective aspect of many insect exoskeletons. I haven't seen this addressed in any books or articles about insect photography, but it seems to be safe to say that some subjects are just not compatible with flash due to their iridescence.

On Film: The choice of film has a lot to do with the type of exposure you record – mostly because different brands and types of films embody different trade offs when it comes to recording the image. The basic factors that you have to control are film speed and latitude.

With a flash held close to the subject, film faster than ISO 100 starts to get problematic. It all depends on the strength of your flash, of course, but on a few occasions I’ve tried shooting out a partial roll of ISO 400 film using the macro flash setup described above. Invariably the images come back over exposed – simply because the flash can’t shut off fast enough for the more sensitive film. Since your shutter speed is capped by the camera’s synch speed anyhow, there is little to gain by using fast film (unless you have a really really weak flash!) So stick with ISO 100 or slower film.

The film’s latitude is another major factor. Color print film has a much broader latitude than most slide film. This broader latitude can mean the difference between dark and light backgrounds, and between and acceptable exposure and an unacceptable one. However, you’ll have to deal with the limitations of color print film – specifically, a slightly less sharp image, less vivid colors, and having to deal with the whole issue of color adjustment.

Personally, I shoot primarily print film with a roll of slide film thrown in every now and then, mostly to assure that my technique isn’t slipping and exposures are still correct. I used mostly plain old Kodak Gold 100 this summer, largely because I had the chance to buy it at a really cheap price. In the slide film arena I found the new Kodak Elitechrome EBX to be the best transparency film for this kind of work – mostly because it has enough latitude to capture the images as I want them captured, while also having vivid colors and great sharpness.

Depth Of Field And Stopping Down: A lot of folks have looked at some of the insect macros in the archive gallery and commented that the images would be better if I stopped down a bit more to improve the depth of field. For instance, take this fly image. Too bad I didn't stop down a bit more to get his toes in focus. This makes sense, so let's figure out what aperture I should have used...

Let's say you have a typical fly and you want to take a 1:1 macro shot of it, looking straight down at it's back, with everything from the hairs on its back to the tips of it's sticky toes in focus. If it's the typical fly, it's probably about 5mm tall. So, what aperture setting would it take to get this kind of DOF?

Well, f32 will get you a total DOF of a little over 4mm. The area in focus is pretty evenly distributed in front and behind the focal plane, so if you can carefully position the focal plane halfway down the fly's body, this would probably work. Flash exposure and diffraction might be a problem, but you could get the DOF.

If you want to just put the focal plane flat on the fly's back and have a DOF of 4mm down to his toes, you have to stop down a bit more -- f64 should do it.

The situation gets worse as you increase magnification. Let's say you snap some extension tubes on your setup and are now shooting at 1.5x life-sized. What aperture do you now need to get the fly's toes in focus? Well... f64 if you can position the focal plane halfway down the fly, f 110 if you want to put it on the fly's back.

I've gone to an extreme to illustrate a point. Specifically, when operating at high magnifications, like 1:1 or greater, stopping down a click or two has little practical value in terms of enhancing DOF. For example, at 1:1 magnification, stopping down from f16 to f22 gets you 0.8 mm additional DOF. In some compositions this may be critical, but in many it has no real practical value.

So, what's the point? Well, let's go back to that fly portrait. If you look at the fly straight down, you see the wings and the back, some hairs sticking out of the side, tops of the eyes and head, and then the legs. You really only see the top millimeter or so of the fly. So the difference between shooting at f11, f16, f22, etc. becomes de minimus. At best you get the fly's thighs, or maybe it's knees, in focus. In terms of composition, a picture of a fly with its toes in focus is probably better than a fly with its toes not in focus. But a fly with its knees in focus, Vs a fly with only it's thighs in focus -- there's no significant advantage.

However, if you stop down as far as you can, considering flash power etc., you will pick up the negative aspects of a smaller aperture -- a darker background, problems balancing the flash and ambient light in the exposure, and loss of sharpness due to diffraction.

So, here's the point: Don't expect more DOF from stopping down than you'll really get, compose in ways that minimize the effect of a shallow DOF, and shoot at the widest possible aperture that you can use (usually f 11 or f16 for close-up work.) OK, three points. And the next time someone says "Too bad the fly's toes aren't in focus" send them a link to this page...

(And also note that this applies only to high magnification photos -- once you get down to 1:4 or so, stopping down has a lot more impact.)

Avoiding Dark Backgrounds: When I first got started with flash photography of insects, several people told me that black backgrounds were just a fact of life. One option that was offered was to manipulate the background to place items closer to the subject. If you pick the right items and arrange them carefully, you can create a naturalistic image.

I haven't done much with this technique because, in the situations that I work with, it is impractical. Trying to prop up a green leaf behind a dragonfly or damsel fly, who may pause for a total of a second or two at one place, just doesn't work. For me, insect photography is a very fast paced, frenetic activity. (That's what makes it fun!) There simply isn't time to manipulate the background behind the insect, and in doing so you are likely to scare the subject off.

I haven't completely licked the dark background problem, and it crops up in almost every roll I shoot. But it's now the exception, and not the rule. A lot of the things that I've mentioned in this essay contribute to solving this problem. Specifically, constructing the flash bracket to throw light behind the subject, controlling exposure settings to balance flash and ambient light, and avoiding unnecessary stopping down. These things will do a lot to minimize black backgrounds.

In addition, I've had a lot more success minimizing this problem by using a longer lens. Shots taken with the 200mm macro show far less black background problems that those taken with the 105mm.

Why's that? It's nothing magical about the longer lens, but is just the practical result of the relative distances involved. The smaller the difference between the subject and background in relation to the distance between the camera and subject, results in a lighter background.  I'll skip the inverse square law analysis that backs up this statement -- but feel free to email me if you really want it.

Attaining The Subject: As mentioned, most of these photos were taken at the Kalamazoo Nature Center. While this facility has an excellent butterfly garden, I have not yet photographed there. For me, a lot of the pleasure in nature photography is being outdoors in relatively natural settings. As such, I've opted for stalking these subjects in their natural environment. And yes -- I'd consider a brick wall or even my bathroom floor to be their natural environment. To my way of thinking, anyplace where the insect lives on its own accord is, de facto, its natural environment.

Dragonflies, damselflies, and butterflies are particularly difficult to catch on film. Dragonflies seem to sense (and avoid) humans with remarkable accuracy.    Damselflies seem to never stand still. And butterflies seem to navigate by Brownian motion -- you can never tell were they'll go next. (Well -- maybe you can, but I can't!)   I have never formally studies insects, but here are some empirical observations that have worked for me:

I do have a couple of tricks that help with stalking, though.  One is to move when everything else moves.  (Ah... Yoda'ish, eh?)  But seriously -- on a breezy day move in on the subjects during the gusts of wind.  The insect's eyes and brain are processing all the movement of the plants etc all around it, and it's less likely to detect your motion in a literal sea of motion around it.  But if you are the only moving thing... well, get a longer lens... 

Another tip is to accelerate at the insect when it senses you and starts to fly off.  Why?  It seems like they hop a short distance and then stop to assess where you are.  I've sometimes leapt at dragonflies who then land closer to me than when they started flying off...   (Another reason why I don't visit butterfly houses -- all this twisting and jumping around would probably get me thrown out!  Far better to do it in an empty field.)  This technique seems to work very well with damselflies.

Learning about the subjects is also helpful in terms of getting closer.  For example, dragonflies seem to return to the same spot over and over, either to eat or between forays out for prey.  So after stalking the dragonfly on barbed wire for a good long time, I finally got close and found that it kept on returning over and over.  Ultimately it became very unconcerned about my presence, and I even got close enough to take a 1:1 portrait of just its face.  With other species as well, 15 minutes of observation before you start shooting, noting when (if ever) they pause in their activities, is time well spent.

Last spring I observed pretty dense clouds of insects on the bark of small saplings that were exuding sap as they were greening out.  Though not of the shots of on this update were taken then, there were abundant native bees, honey bees, butterflies, moths, flies, and ants.  So keep your eye out for abundant food supplies and the insects around them.

In the past I have resorted to baiting to get some insect shots (none of the shots in the current gallery were taken this way, but a few of the bee flies in the archives were.)   I'd put a small drop of raw honey in a flower and wait for bees (or bee flies) to come and eat.  There are problems with this approach, as with any manipulative approach.  You may draw the bee to a flower that it would not ordinarily frequent and create an incongruous image.  Also, the honey will surely kill the flower, so do this with the cutting flowers in your garden and not with wildflowers.

Sometimes I run into advice from insect photographers who comment that they capture their subjects, chill them, and then put the slow moving cold insect on a flower or leaf to simulate a naturally occurring scene. I haven't used that approach here, simply because it seems that it would not be conducive to getting a truly natural portrait of the insect.  Even more so than baiting, the photographer is manipulating the scene and creating the potential to set up a photo that is only superficially accurate.  When you take out that chilled butterfly and put it on flower -- is that really a flower that the butterfly would frequent?  Will you be able to photograph it actually feeding?  At a more basic level -- if you can get close enough to the insect to catch it, why not just photograph it then? And while I'm not ready to join the insects' rights movement -- it does seem that the rapid chilling and re-heating of insects would harm, if not kill them.   A quick chill and  is much different than the slow chilling process that insects under go during cool evenings.  And if you kill them, they won't be there for the next photographer, or even for yourself the next day. 

Putting It All Together – Some Practical Considerations: So let’s take all of the above and roll it up into some practical info. The info that follows references the Pentax Pz-1p, but probably could apply to most other SLR cameras.

OK – the basic setup. I start with the Pa-1p with an SMC A* 200mm f4 macro. Sometimes, but not very frequently, I’ll setup with a 105mm macro. When shooting insect macros I always put a UV filter on the lens, mostly to protect the front element. I’ve read on the internet a lot of  discussion about the use of UV filters to protect lenses, with purists tending to insist that they degrade image quality and should be avoided. In some situations a UV filter is probably unnecessary, but when stalking insects you’ll find yourself crawling through tall grass and worming the front of your lens into bushes etc to get the bug in your sights. Although I’m always careful and always use the lens hood, inevitably a twig or leaf or even the subject will poke the front element of the lens. And after just a few months there are enough pinpoint marks on the UV filter that I was using to convince me that it’s a worthwhile addition to the setup.

Of course, the flash is mounted in a bracket as shown above. The flash itself is connected to the camera body via a TTL flash cord. As a special note to Pentax users: the Pentax flash extension system, while being very feature rich and flexible, struck me as being over engineered and too fragile and expensive for this kind of work. So, I use the simpler Canon offshoe cord 2. The pinout on the Canon cord matches the Pentax pinout, with the exception of the pin needed to activate the on flash AF assist beam (which is not needed for this kind of work).

Now that everything is assembled, it’s time to put the camera in its initial settings. First, all this shooting is done in manual mode, so I set the Pz-1p in hyper-manual, with metering either in multi-segment or center weighted. As a basic starting point the camera is usually set to f16, 1/250^th shutter speed, and no flash compensation. The starting point is typically my best guess about what the correct manual setting will be, bearing in mind that I want it to be one half to two stops under exposed. Autofocus is usually activated (which becomes trap focus with the manual focus lens.)

Then – start stalking the subject. Once something interesting is spotted, I guestimate the magnification needed, and roughly preset the lens to focus at this point. A quick glance that the focusing scales tells me how far away to be, and I try to place myself a little further back than that, and lean in to close the distance. Nothing is more frustrating than getting too close and finding that you are cropping out your subject in what would otherwise be a great shot!

Flash compensation is also adjusted at this point. If compensation is needed it is usually to cool the flash down a bit, especially if you are shooting a small light subject on a darker background.

Once the subject is in the finder, I adjust the aperture and/or shutter so that the ambient light exposure is ½ to 2 stops underexposed. This gets the ambient light balanced with the flash, but darkens the background a bit to make sure that the subject "pops" a little. This adjustment is generally done by opening or closing the aperture, since a shutter speed of 1/180^th or 1/250^th is required to minimize camera shake. Film type and the distance between the subject and background determine the amount of under exposure.

If I look in the finder and see the exposure meter off the scale, I hit the "IF" button, which automatically sets the exposure. I programmed my camera to leave the shutter speed fixed and adjust the aperture, as opposed to the default setting of adjusting the shutter and aperture per the program line. The nice thing about this feature is that it quickly gets you to a starting point, and then with a click of a dial the exposure can be set to account for the flash.

With the exposure set, I move in on the subject and hope to snag it using trap focus, but I keep my left thumb on the switch to flip AF off and rely on my reflexes if either the composition or the lighting are not good for trap focus.

And once the image is snapped, there is nothing to do but to wait for the flash to recharge and hope to get a second chance at the subject.

It’s all pretty easy, but it is a lot to keep track of in the second or two when the insect is actually in position to be photographed. And I must admit, I make a lot of bone headed mistakes that result in wasted time and film. It’s not unusual for me to screw up by shooting before the flash recharges, forgetting about exposure compensation and settings and shooting several mis-exposed images, or sometimes just plain forgetting to turn the flash on (and not noticing the absence of the flash indicator in the finder.)

But, like they say -- you learn from your mistakes...

Additional Info: Like I said many words ago, I'm not an expert and I'm still pretty much a newcomer to photography in general – I did just get started with this hobby in the summer of 1997.  So, for additional information, take a look at John Shaw's Close Ups In Nature (ISBN 0-8174-4052-6) or Paul Hicks's Photographing Butterflies And Other Insects (ISBN 0-86343-332-4).  For web based resources, Steve Hoffman's site,  http://www.sphoto.com/, has a very good overview of how to photograph insects in the photo tech tips section.  This was one of the first resources I utilized on this subject.    Another site, that I just ran into,  is David Westover's How To Photograph Dragonflies With Flash, http://insects.ummz.lsa.umich.edu/MICHODO/westover/index.htmll.   And finally, W. Tracy Parnell has some excellent insect images on his website, http://www.madbbs.com/~tracy, and an informative essay on photographing butterflies at http://www.madbbs.com/~tracy/photo/howto.htm .