Over the past couple months, I have been keeping an eye on the photostream of Opo Terser. Armed with a Pentax K200D, Opo’s various photos show a fine mastery of macrophotography [which is fairly tricky when working with insects]. Coming from a fellow entomology enthusiast, it is really stunning to see the amount of insect ‘head shots’ in his photos.
Getting fully focused, color rich photos of insects takes several attempts, considering how fast most insects move in comparison to a camera shutter. Opo is also an avid astrophotrographer. What is most interesting about both his astro and macro photos would be that they are both taken with the same Pentax K200D camera.
A good majority of astrophotographers I know or have studied use an entirely seperate camera to capture images. Furthermore, it is pretty rare to find someone willing to photograph far off galaxies as well as rare insects. Enjoy and be inspired!
Flickr Photostream: Link
I’ve also followed OpoTerser’s flickr stream over the years. I think the trick is to put the insects in a cold environment (a.k.a. refrigerator or freezer) until their metabolism slows down and they become very sluggish or even motionless. Not too long! You don’t want to kill the little guys.
Totally wild stuff. I generally hate spiders, but some of these actually make them look cute with those huge round eyes. Cool stuff.
Thanks for the post! I’m always thrilled to see my photos featured on various sites throughout the web!
allen- A few years ago I actually did try the freezer trick a couple of times but I sadly ended up killing a bug or two.
I’m understandably quite attached to arthropods and since those few experiments – I will not try to cool any arthropods down – I just take a LOT of photos – the more you take, the better chances of getting a good shot.
So in short: all the bugs you will see in my photostream are quite alive and quite healthy.