All the small things

All work and no play makes for a dull old life, so I thought I'd post some shots from my current personal project. You may have guessed by now, but what gets my camera out of its bag in the evenings and the weekends? Insects...

Yeah ok, perhaps they are not the most exciting of creatures, but they are fascinating, the variation, the variety, the seemingly alien characteristics.

All of the shots above were shot with a Canon MP E-65 lens. Its a great piece of kit, no image stabilisation and no autofocus but it will fill the frame with an object the size of a grain of rice.
For the majority of my shots with this lens I also use the MT-24 flash. I tend to have the camera on full manual control and adjust the shutter speed/aperture combination to try to keep a reasonable amount of ambient light present in the background, to avoid that 'shot at night' look which you can get with macro flash if you're not careful.

The best thing about shooting insects is that I don't need to leave my garden! No carbon footprint tracking these down, just a gentle stroll through my vegetable patch! Although I did have to sacrifice a couple of cabbages to get this shot of the caterpillar of the large cabbage white butterfly....hey ho...I don't really like cabbage anyway, but I expect my gran will be disappointed!