Moth and Some Ice

Broke out the old super macro rig tonight. Victor and I had few hours to kill, so we decided to 1. eat food and 2. take awesome pictures.

The set up looks as follows. Pretty much the same as the other super macros I've done.


We started off with just some ice cubes and the bubbles in them. I focused by raising the camera up and down because the depth of field was sooooo shallow. It was really cool just to watch in the view finder because you could see the different layer in the ice. Almost like scanning through it layer by layer. I pretty much just took pictures of everything because it looked cool and sorted them later.

Editing them was pretty straight forward since I'd done it before. First, I cropped the images, then I did my exposure adjustments. Clairy up, contrast up, highlights and blacks down, and whites up. This combination gave more depth and feeling, and also brought out the details more. I didn't apply noise reduction because they're already pretty noise free and sharp.

Then we saw the moth. And knew it had to be photographed. This giant moth landed close to us (we were in the garage), and was just hanging out there. So I put some honey on a piece of plastic, and coaxed the moth on said piece of plastic. He/she just attacked the honey and didn't pay us much attention as I moved him/her to the camera.

Tips on focusing on a insect with a macro. Shot gun the shutter.  Get really good at timing your shot right when the subject is going to be in focus, you have to be preemptive and pretty lucky. They move so fast that it's just a guessing game after you get the focus in the ball park. By some luck, I got some epic pictures of the moths feet, head, and tongue. Yes, the tongue. It's barbed, by the way. And moths do get full at some point as we discovered when he/she suddenly flew away. It's been a scientific night.

I shot at f4, ISO100 and 1/200. The strobes were at 1/1 and 1/16. I'm not sure why I needed so much power, but apparently I did. I usually only have to use on in a soft box at 1/16.

For editing, I hardly touched these. I really only cropped and maybe did some selective clarity adjustments on the eye one, but that's about it.

These next two I did some more editing on. I raised the contrast a lot, as well as the shadows, whites and clarity. Pretty much everything up, haha.

Finally, the tongue picture. This one I spent more time on, especially getting the cropping right. 

I put the overall exposure up, the upped the shadows a ton, bumped the whites and dropped the blacks a hair. Also put the clarity up a lot. This all brought out more of the tongue and separated it from the honey. I also raised the saturation of the oranges, reds, and yellows. 

Oh, and all of this was tinted very blue.

As always, look at them on Fb!

See you tomorrow!