Insects and spiders magnified

Thomas has spent several hours photographing a single spider before – numerous times. They don’t always stick around or cooperate and Thomas’ success rate is around 5-10% and when he may be taking several hundred photographs, it can be quite physically tiring. Also, knowing how to approach bugs and understanding their behaviour is vital for this high magnification macro photography.

“I only photograph live, healthy arthropods in good shape – I never harm them or restrict their movement in order to take a photograph.

“As for processing, I am very careful not to misrepresent or alter the natural beauty of the bug in any way. Aside from cropping and occasionally focus-stacking, I usually only make subtle digital adjustments to the levels, colour balance or reduce noise in the background.

“I use Photoshop to bring out the natural beauty of the subject and will never fabricate details or colours within the images or never physically alter the structure of the arthropod. I don’t want to present a false view of a bug to the public – and if I did, some of the entomologist folks I know would notice and call me out.”

This guy proved a bit more friendly than the others, and crawled up on my finger and let me re-locate him an a big leaf which I held up to the sky to get the blue background. Once I was done, I put him back right where I found him – on the sunflower near another Oncometopian.

Thomas usually rolls back the saturation/sharpness setting when shooting and, additionally, tends to underexpose so not to overexpose any subtle details, colours, or hairs on the bugs – he can’t afford to lose anything.

When it comes to kit, Thomas uses a Pentax K200D DSLR body and vintage primes for two reasons – they are cheap and sharp.

“I have a set of extension tubes and either a vintage Asahi Pentax Takumar 50mm f/1.4 or a Pentax Takumar 28mm f/2.8 bayonet mount prime reversed on the end of the tubes.”

For lighting, Thomas uses an old Vivitar Zoom Thyristor 3500 flashgun which is diffused by a homemade softbox crafted from a used goldfish box, duct tape, tinfoil, paper towel, and clear plastic!

For Thomas, the main reason for creating homemade kit to help capture these images, except for his enjoyment, is to get more people appreciating arthropods and all they do. As Thomas says: “Photography is an immensely powerful tool – use it for something important. Try to reveal the unappreciated and unnoticed subtleties of life. Use it to accomplish what you physically cannot.”

These little robbers are incredibly skittish – an absolute pain (literally!) to shoot. They will hold onto their perch (usually the outer tip of leaves) no matter how hard the wind may blow – but as soon as you get anywhere near them, touch the leaf they are on (no matter how gently) they will fly right away.

Here’s a close-up of the adult male Paraphidippus aurantius jumping
spider I found with abikeOdyssey last week while out macro-shooting at Red Bud Valley Nature Preserve near Catoosa, Oklahoma. The image above is actually a crop from a focus stack of five photos taken at about 4:1 magnification with the 28mm at f/5.6 reversed on a set of extension tubes. He was a pretty active jumper with some really impressive chelicerae and front legs.

Here’s a shot of the anterior median and anterior lateral eyes of an adult female Phidippus putnami. She must have just molted as she was in absolutely immaculate condition – perfectly clean eyes, no lost scales, no messed up hair and she was quite cooperative while I photographed her!

Taken with the 50mm reversed to the bellows and is full frame. Pretty low magnification for me, but I just couldn’t bring myself to crop it (the eyes are just slightly out of focus any way). Images like this never get as many views but that doesn’t really matter.

Go to: www.thomasshahan.com to see more of his great images.