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In the garden I found an old favourite of mine, the Lacewing larvae. In the US they are known as Trash Bugs for their habit of camouflaging themselves with bits of debris. This one has only a small collection of "trash" and I have seen other individuals with quite a pile stacked up on their backs. This one has come across what I assume to be barkfly eggs (due to the protective covering of silk) and is no doubt making a meal of them.
This stack took a fair bit of work to put together. I was trying out my new, lightweight 90ex flash that I got with the EOS-M. It's recycle time isn't as quick as my 430ex II and the batteries were running low anyway. It took a few seconds between each shot and the lacewing was twisting and flexing as it sucked out the egg contents. In order to get better alignment I divided the stack into sections; stacking 4 close crops of the head in Zerene and a separate group of 9 images for the body. I then combined the images as layers in Photoshop and merged them seamlessly (I hope!) using the transform tool and layer masks. John Hallmén has a very good YouTube video that describes this technique a bit better.
Sucking Eggs by Tim.Garlick, on Flickr
This stack took a fair bit of work to put together. I was trying out my new, lightweight 90ex flash that I got with the EOS-M. It's recycle time isn't as quick as my 430ex II and the batteries were running low anyway. It took a few seconds between each shot and the lacewing was twisting and flexing as it sucked out the egg contents. In order to get better alignment I divided the stack into sections; stacking 4 close crops of the head in Zerene and a separate group of 9 images for the body. I then combined the images as layers in Photoshop and merged them seamlessly (I hope!) using the transform tool and layer masks. John Hallmén has a very good YouTube video that describes this technique a bit better.
Sucking Eggs by Tim.Garlick, on Flickr