A simple DIY macro flash bracket, pt. 2

I took the macro flash bracket I built out for a spin today and got some great results. The first thing I did was to move the flash from the left to the right side so it doesn’t interfere with my left hand adjusting the focus ring on the lens. I think, in the future at some point, I might pick up a tripod collar mount and attach the bracket to that instead — that way I can have even more control over the flash location.

I decided to go check out a small local green space — my neighborhood has a shortage of them, unfortunately — and found a great carpenter bee about halfway there, gathering pollen from a flowering bush. I slightly missed the focus, but not so badly to lose the photo.

The area I went to is open to the public, but I don’t think it’s an actual park. There’s one rotting tree in particular that always has interesting things living in it, so I went straight there. Immediately, I saw a long insect, vaguely dragonfly-like in form, flying next to it and got in close to take a photo. Two things immediately caught my eye: first, the black and yellow ‘warning’ coloration of a wasp, and second, the other five or six I was immediately next to.

I didn’t remember exactly what they were until I got home: giant ichneumon wasps. This species is remarkable for its parasitoid lifestyle. The female lays her eggs in the wood-dwelling larvae of another wasp species by drilling through the tree and into the larval wasp with a long, sharp ovipositor. The larval ichneumons grow inside the other wasp until pupating — this is invariably fatal to the other wasp — and what I came across today was a crowd of males racing to fertilize one or more females still inside the tree.

I got a number of good images of these wasps, enough to post in their own gallery here. (The other photos I took today are in this gallery.)

After moving on, I found another bee on a tree root. It either couldn’t fly or didn’t want to, though eventually climbed very quickly up the tree. I’m not sure if it was a dark breed of honey bee, or one that had lost most of its hairs, but its abdomen was entirely bald and black.

Leaving the grounds, I decided to take a quick shot of a few small leaves. I almost didn’t because it’s the kind of shot I’ve taken many times, but I felt like I should see how well the bracket worked for more still-life types of macro images. Looking at the image on the viewfinder, I was surprised to see a little bug of some kind in perfect focus. I have no idea what it is exactly; maybe an aphid or something.

Coming home, I had a really high percentage of keepers today. A lot of what I tossed were intentional losses — even at f/14, macro DOF is thin enough that handholding the camera will inevitably mean camera shake moves the focus point off your subject, so I’ll often take a couple to improve the odds, and toss all but the best one. Even the second-best shots are generally sharp, in focus, and well defined, and I attribute this to the convenience of having the flash on a macro bracket. Without it, I’d have been shooting in Tv at a high shutter speed, sacrificing ISO and small apertures, and while you can definitely get good shots doing that, my yield was much better today.