Prologue

This guy was haunting me since morning, posing in different angles. I saw him ( her ? ) in the morning and decided to ignore. Now in the evening he kept taunting me with his different styles and that’s when I decided to click his photograph. Once it was done, he simply flew away

Technical Details

This was my first experiment with macro photography of a living thing, that is, a bug. So I was not pretty sure where to start. So I decided to setup for the basic photography rules and start from there.

Firstly I made the bug crawl into a white paper, that I picked from the printer tray. This ensured that there was no unwanted distracting stuff in the background. Reverse mounted a 35 mm lens ( using adapter) simply because, I did not have a macro lens 🙂 . Tried using external flash, mounted on the cam, but did not work ,because the camera kept saying it does not support TTL even after the flash gun was set to Manual mode.

Since I am in reverse mount mode, and since I cannot make use the powerful light stand that I have( because the bug simply doesn’t remain stationary ) or my flash gun, I am left with the only option of using my inbuilt flash. And since I do not have enough light to light up the subject, when I look through the viewfinder, I get to see only a hazy image, due to the lack of the light. That means, until I see the final photo on the back of the LCD screen, I cannot be sure, if the object was in focus, if there was adequate light and if the composition was correct.

After several hit and misses I got some shots I was looking for. There is definitely scope for improvement and I learned a lot today.

Once we were done with the photography session, I made sure I took him outside and kept at a place where he could enjoy the bright moon light and the cool breeze and I then headed for dinner, which I had prepared.

Camera settings

Light : In build flash on the camera, set in manual mode at full power
Lens : 35 mm , reverse mounted using reverse mount ring
Photo settings: ISO 100, 1/200 sec ( no fstop, thanks to reverse mounting)
Filenames : DSC 7396, 7401, 7402

Other worthy shots