Best of the summer

Bug season is pretty much winding down here in the northeast, and I've been going through my work from the summer, taking stock of what I've gotten. This is the first year I've done this type of photography, and it's gratifying to see the improvement I've made.

I thought I'd post a handful of what I feel is my best work from the season. I've posted a couple of these here before, but these all reflect some aspect of how I've developed as a photographer this year. (This post was written for dgrin.com this morning, but I thought it would be worth posting here as well.)


This is really the first macro shot I was able to accurately previsualize and then produce; it's also my favorite image since going digital. On top of that, this shoot was the first time I learned about metallic bees, which I think are fantastically cool :)



An Asian ladybug on the fence in my front yard; like the green metallic bee, this was among the first images where I was capable of controlling the light in a way that gave me the image I was visualizing. This was taken on a pretty sunny day, not ten feet in front of the white-ish siding of my apartment.



A simple carpenter ant on some kind of flower. (Plant ID is a real weak spot for me -- I'd captioned one photo as an insect on 'some kind of flower', until my girlfriend pointed out that it was, in fact, a common rose.)

I don't think I'd have been able to get a shot with this degree of contrast, with the soft lighting of the buds, and with a hyperactive ant, earlier in the summer, without so much exposure and focus chimping I'd lost the shot. I've gotten good enough at those, particularly at focusing, that I can usually get the shot I want without having to do much of that at all; I find I take two or three shots out of habit, and all of them are technically fine.


I have very few good butterfly images. I definitely need to learn how to approach them, and then get an exposure that's not entirely blown out, since I was mostly seeing these cabbage whites this summer. This one is pretty standard as far as composition goes, but I do like the contrasting shapes of the animal and flower.



This greater angle-winged katydid was just fun to shoot. It was pretty mellow and climbed right onto my hand, so this is from one of the few times I got to shoot a single animal in different compositions over a somewhat extended period of time.



This photo was a real goal of mine all summer. I was on my way home from the park the last week in August when I spotted this tiny orchard spider at the base of a shrub, and I got exactly what I had tried for with any number of less colorful spiders, by laying down behind the web and shooting upwards.