A leaf is big if you are small

GardenersHelper

GardenersHelper

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Nick
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Inspired by the fascinating posts here of very small animals, Springtails, Barkflies and the like, I've been trying to find something similar to photograph in our garden for several days, without much luck. The few small things I found rushed around and disappeared before I could get my act together to photograph them.

Yesterday my luck changed. This handsome little thing stayed on the same leaf for quarter of an hour and moved around at a very gentle pace so I could get some different angles on it.

According to my calculations the head and body are around 1.3mm long.

These images were captured using a Panasonic G3 micro four thirds camera hand held, with a Raynox MSN-202 close-up lens on a Panasonic 45-175 zoom lens, with illumination from a home made flash diffuser on a Metz 58 AF-2 flash unit fitted on the G3 hot shoe. The images were captured as RAW and processed in Lightroom.

There are bigger versions at Flickr if you are interested, at my standard size of 1100 pixels high.


0620 01 2014-11-16 P1850321 LR-2 Uncropped by gardenersassistant, on Flickr


0620 06 2014-11-16 P1850335 LR-3 Crop 2 by gardenersassistant, on Flickr


0620 10 2014-11-16 P1850352 LR Crop by gardenersassistant, on Flickr


0620 12 2014-11-16 P1850359 LR-2 Crop by gardenersassistant, on Flickr


0620 18 2014-11-16 P1850375 LR-2 Crop by gardenersassistant, on Flickr


0620 20 2014-11-16 P1850378 LR-2 Crop by gardenersassistant, on Flickr


0620 22 2014-11-16 P1850397 LR Crop by gardenersassistant, on Flickr


0620 25 2014-11-16 P1850400 LR Uncropped by gardenersassistant, on Flickr
 
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These are really terrific Nick, and I am pleased you are able to go after the smaller things now. I'm very jealous of your find (Calvatomina nr superba). At first i thought it was one of the Dicyrtomina species I see often, but this one has orange eye patches which gave it away.

Great find and great set.
 
Good capture, nice clarity and the lighting looks really nice too.
Well done (y)
 
Amazing Nick are you happy with them?

Now there is another species I would love to find. Its like rorschach v2.

(y)
 
"Excellent" set Nick I'm very impressed with these images and what you have used to get them.(y)

So much so I am about to order a "Raynox 202" (I've already have the 250) as an addition to my bits & bobs. Hopefully it'll be waiting for me when I get back to the UK possibly a little later this week.

George.
 
Thanks everyone for the very kind comments. It is all very encouraging.

TimmyG said:
These are really terrific Nick, and I am pleased you are able to go after the smaller things now. I'm very jealous of your find (Calvatomina nr superba). At first i thought it was one of the Dicyrtomina species I see often, but this one has orange eye patches which gave it away.
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Thanks for the ID Tim. As you know, I'm next to useless at identifying anything. On that score, I went to a local wood today, and it is one of the local wildlife trust reserves so I'll be sending a Flickr link to the trust to help with their recording. They like to have things identified, and I've been going to iSpot for that, which is ok-ish for what I've been photographing up to now. However, I suspect that this small stuff is a bit specialised and I may not get much help at iSpot, so any identifications (firm, qualified or tentative) you and other folk here can provide for the little things would be very helpful indeed.

Tintin124 said:
Amazing Nick are you happy with them?
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Based on past experience, I expected to be defeated by globbies, so I'm on a bit of a high at the moment and feeling quite chuffed. It's not so much an issue of image quality as being able to do it at all. It has suddenly opened up a whole new world for me, which is why I rushed out today to somewhere that I thought might have rather more of these things than our garden, where to be honest they are rather few and far between, at least as far as my ability to find them is concerned. The wood today was a different matter altogether. I've been there before a couple of times but never found much to photograph. But today I saw the place with different eyes, and I saw a lot more going on, and plenty to try to photograph.

G.K.Jnr. said:
"Excellent" set Nick I'm very impressed with these images and what you have used to get them.(y)

So much so I am about to order a "Raynox 202" (I've already have the 250) as an addition to my bits & bobs. Hopefully it'll be waiting for me when I get back to the UK possibly a little later this week.
Click to expand...

People are often surprised at what can be done with achromats (or reversing rings for that matter).

I hope you enjoy using the 202. As you already use the 250 you already know the issues, just more so with the 202. As with the 250 (at least as it was for me with the 250), you may need a bit of patience while you work on it until things fall into place with using it.

lightshipman said:
Brilliant shots, and very steady hands!!!
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That's an interesting point. My hands aren't particularly steady, which is why I've always tended to use a tripod. hands-on mainly like some people use a monopod, pole or stick, to damp down hand shake to help with composition and in my case also slow shutter speeds for natural light shots where I have to keep my hands on the camera to track a slowly moving subject, for example for snails in motion soon after dawn when the light level is very low.

However, today I went out to the woods late morning, and took the tripod with me, and during the hour or so I was there I didn't use it, or even think about using it. I went back after lunch and didn't even take the tripod with me. I'm still rather surprised that this works. I think it's a timing thing with the rocking. With these higher magnifications I can't hold the camera so the image stays in focus, so its a matter of pressing the shutter button so the image is captured as you pass through the point of best placed focus. I don't see the image as it will be while focusing, because I shoot with minimum aperture and what I see on the LCD is, I assume, what the camera sees at maximum aperture - a thin slice of the scene, or in the case of higher magnifications, a very thin slice of the scene. That may actually be an advantage in helping to identify when the plane of focus is (passing through) where I want to place it.

I suppose the beta blockers help a bit too, but the image jiggles about a lot, so I don't think having especially steady hands is a requirement for this.I certainly wouldn't want anyone to be put off trying to do this sort of stuff because they believe they need rock steady hands but know their hands shake a bit.

Another thing that may help is that I'm not exactly composing the shots in the normal sense. Usually I compose to pretty close to the edge of the screen, and to hold the camera to a tightly defined composition, especially when I take sequences of shots, which I do quite a lot, is not (for me) practical hand held. However, with this higher magnification stuff I'm cropping for dof. I have the Rule of Thirds line on the screen the whole time and try to keep the subject within the central area. Because of hand shake I can't actually keep the subject within the box the whole time, but that doesn't matter, because the central Rule of Thirds box is giving me the scale to work to. There is plenty of latitude around the edges for composition later and it doesn't actually matter (within limits) exactly where on the frame the subject ends up.
 
GardenersHelper said:
Usually I compose to pretty close to the edge of the screen,There is plenty of latitude around the edges for composition later and it doesn't actually matter (within limits) exactly where on the frame the subject ends up.
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Except perhaps, that the centre of your lens should be the sharpest so will give you the best results...

Great shots though these.

Paul.
 
Nick it's the opposite to what I found when I went to woods I found it dead hard to find collembola and a like though this was before my recent finds in my garden and also the leaf litter was about 10" thick so may have better eyes next time.

But the garden for me has been very fruitful and if you have foreign follage then as above can get some foreign species. :)
 
Tintin124 said:
Nick it's the opposite to what I found when I went to woods I found it dead hard to find collembola and a like though this was before my recent finds in my garden and also the leaf litter was about 10" thick so may have better eyes next time.

But the garden for me has been very fruitful and if you have foreign follage then as above can get some foreign species. :)
Click to expand...

Yes, it is opposite. It took me three days to find one collembola in the garden, and about 3 minutes (well, maybe slightly longer) in the woods. Plenty there, but not much variety, not in what I captured anyway. Now I've gone through the photos I think that almost all of them were the same species.

You certainly do have to get your eye in for them. I think I'm starting to get better at distinguishing with naked eye between collembola and spots on leaves etc.
 
GardenersHelper said:
Yes, it is opposite. It took me three days to find one collembola in the garden, and about 3 minutes (well, maybe slightly longer) in the woods.
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Then again, today I went out to two other local woods and found no collembolas (collembolae?), and almost nothing else. :(

Still, it was nice to be out in the fresh air. :)
 
I don't know if it was asked here or the other I getting very confused this week with the training course and the technical aspects of photography.

Did you mention which plant this particular springtail was around being it's an Australian beastie? Sure it was @TimmyG that asked on one thread.
 
Tintin124 said:
I don't know if it was asked here or the other I getting very confused this week with the training course and the technical aspects of photography.

Did you mention which plant this particular springtail was around being it's an Australian beastie? Sure it was @TimmyG that asked on one thread.
Click to expand...

Yes, @TimmyG asked in this post in my journey thread. The springtail was in the leaf litter, not on a particular plant. Elsewhere in the garden we have some Australian plants (Eucalyptus, Callistemon, Pittosporum and Olearia), and a couple from New Zealand (Phormium and Hebe), but probably all of these would have been propagated in this country and so none of these are likely to have been direct imports. So maybe that species it is just out in the wild now and doing fine on native plants.
 
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