and the Dogwoods are in bloom. Molorchus bimaculatus is a small cerambycid which commonly frequents flowers in the early spring; sure enough they were out in numbers this past Friday.
This mating pair was quite oblivious to my intrusion and went on about their business, or rather, the female went on about feeding and the male, well, went on about his business.
After rearing several of these Hercules beetles from eggs to adults, a process the I started in 2006 and finally culminated in mid-2009, I finally got around to photographing a couple of the adults. Due to their size, I decided to try and photograph the these beetles under natural light rather than setup a complex flash and diffuser array.
The photos were taken with a 100mm macro lens under natural light using an improvised setup made of tracing paper for a diffuser and a piece of white posterboard to reflect some of the ambient light. I used a Wimberly Plamp clamped on my tripod to hold several stiffened sheets of the tracing paper in place a short distance above the beetles.
I photographed the beetles one at a time on a fallen log; my tripod was set so it would not cast any shadows on the scene and close enough so the Plamp would hold the improvised diffuser above the beetles. The settings used for both images are 1/200 sec at f/8 and ISO 400.
Overall I am pleased with the results but less so with the photo of the male – at the least the lighting is too overwhelming due to the male’s darker coloration. The image of the female is definitely better; the lighting looks more natural and the reflections are not to obvious. Any thoughts?
Welcome to life on six legs, a chronicle of my adventures in insect photography.
Let’s start off with something neat - here is a Multicolored Asian Lady Beetle – Harmonia axyridis – chowing down on a very unfortunate aphid.
