(as time goes on you will understand I am a bit slow
).
Welcome to the slow club! Nice to know I'm not alone.
How do you get everything set up when your subject matter will not sit still.
Do you have to give everything a little nip of whisky to encourage them to stay
Some people (including some of the macro stars) do sometimes use sugary stuff to keep insects busy or attract them to a pre-rigged photo setup, but it isn't something I've tried yet.
Partly I suppose it's because I shoot flowers as much as insects, spiders etc. Mind you, although buds/flowers/leaves stay put (well, apart from moving in the breeze of course), the light doesn't. I look out for flowers etc which are interestingly lit (in a pool of light, back lit or whatever - typically illuminated by light coming through gaps in foliage, often in the late afternoon when the quality of the light can be rather special). But once I have spotted something promising I do try to set up the shot as quickly as I can, because the effect sometimes only lasts a few seconds more after I have noticed it. Easy to miss those. It is amazing how quickly the light on a small scene can change as the sun and/or clouds move.
There is one situation where I use a tripod where the subject/scene always moves faster than I can respond to. This is where light is falling on to a subject (typically a flower), with sunlight coming through gaps in tree foliage up above which is moving in a slight breeze. This can give continually changing illumination on the subject and from time to time can produce really nice effects. But it changes far too fast for me to spot a nice effect and decide to photograph it, even if I have everything lined up and waiting for the right moment. So I take bursts of shots and sort through them later on the PC to see if I captured anything nice. Sometimes it works a treat.
With insects etc, it depends on the particular animal, and the time of day. For example, I like photographing flies. Many of them do stand around from time to time. If you can find one blowing a bubble the chances are it is going to stay there, very still, for a good while (minutes). Even if not blowing a bubble they quite often stay still for long enough to set up for a shot or three, and sometimes stick around long enough to let you try shots from two or three different angles. Sometimes they groom themselves, and they can spend whole minutes on that. If you are using flash that is fine, but it isn't quite such a good opportunity for me when I am using natural light because their legs move really fast when they are grooming and I usually find it difficult to get a fast enough shutter speed for a nice grooming image.
There are other flies that are much more elusive. For example, I really like scorpion flies, but they (at least the ones I have come across) rarely stay for any length of time in convenient photographable positions. Quite often as I am setting up a shot they move away. So getting a nice picture of a scorpion fly is more of an achievement for me.
Some insects simply move around so much that using a tripod isn't really a runner, for example bees gathering nectar from flowers. Butterflies, dragonflies and damselflies are other subjects that I often have better success with if I work hand-held, although it is more 50/50 as between hand-held and tripod for these, unlike bees which tends to be work handheld or forget it (which is also the case I find for insects in flight).
As for the time of day, when I started visiting local nature reserves several months ago I started getting up really early in the morning and getting on site by dawn (all a bit of a shock to the system for a night owl like me). At that time of day there tends to be much less breeze, and sometimes completely still air. (I monitor the local weather forecasts to pick days with promising forecasts.) Early in the morning you are more likely to find insects that are absolutely still, sometimes standing around in and/or covered by dew droplets, which can look a bit special. Snails, another of my favourite subjects, seem to be more active early in the day too and you can sometimes get lovely shots of them clambering (if that's the word for it) around in bushes - they are much more agile than you might imagine.
There are other insects such as crane flies and shield bugs that stay still in plain sight for long periods, as do some spiders, especially the ones that have webs that they sit in the middle of waiting for lunch to arrive. A problem with spiders in particular (but also for some insects) is that the best photo opportunities are when they leap into action on some prey - and the rapid flexibility of hand-held with flash is usually much better than using a tripod in those circumstances.
So I suppose the answer to your question about setting up time with a tripod is "it depends, and for some subjects/situations it doesn't work very well, or doesn't work at all".
(although with such a wonderful garden as yours, I can see why they would)
The wife was dead chuffed when I told her that! She loves this garden, and she is the Gardener. I get to dig holes, remove tree stumps, mow the grass, and generally do what I'm told (and try not to bend, break or squash the plant life when taking pictures
).
