Fly eye macros

[daft_biker]

Ok so January might not be the best time for fly photography for many of us but it came up in another discussion about how to get close to flies to photograph them so I thougt I'd share a few images and tips.

The best tip I can give is to move slowly when approaching a fly. Sudden movements are likely to spook your subject. Ideally you want to have all your camera settings dialled in before approaching as clicking buttons and spinning dials while close to a fly can spook it too. Some flies just don't seem to want to have their photo taken so a big part of it is trial and error and having enough patience to keep trying.

Exposure setting will vary according to conditions but if wishing to capture as much detail as possible of compound eyes I'd suggest using manual focus and setting the lens to the minimum focus distance. Focus the image by moving the camera and lens back and forth. If you have extension tubes or close up filters it would probably be a good idea to put them on and get as much magnification as you can. Unless you have extremely high magnification macro equipment you'll probably want to get as close as you can go. All the images I'm posting were taken with a Canon MP-E 65mm magnifying macro lens which is capable of recording images at 5:1 (5x lifesize). A typical macro lens is capable of recording images upto a magnification of 1:1 (1x lifesize) so hopefully you'll see the need to get as close as possible to capture as much detail of such small and intricate structures.

This first image is of a long legged fly and is quite a severe crop from an image taken at 5:1.


The next image is some sort of flesh fly and is an uncropped shot taken at 5:1 (area photographed is about 4.5mm x 3mm).

(Click image for larger)

Some flies have fantastic colours in their eyes. I think this is a cleg or a horse fly:


Last shot is one of the first fly eye close ups I did. The subject was dead so no chance it was going to fly away.....an easy target but it's probably easier to find live ones!

(Click image for larger)

Comments and questions welcome. Also, feel free to add your own fly eye shots and give some details of the equipment used and any tips you have.

Cheers,
Andy

[andromeda]

Congrats! that is a set of very beautiful eyes indeed. How I wish i could have such wonderful eyes
Very well taken and great job!!!

[troutwhisperer]

Daft,

I notice on your flickr page you have a ring flash. Did you use that to take these shots?

[daft_biker]

Originally Posted by troutwhisperer

Daft,

I notice on your flickr page you have a ring flash. Did you use that to take these shots?

Cheers guys Think these were all done with a macro twin flash rather a ring flash but same sort of idea. This next one was done using a ring flash as they work well for this sort of stuff too:



These were taken at pretty high magnifications because true flies usually have eyes that are just a few mm but there are other insects that have larger compound eyes. In the summer months dragon flies should be out and they usually have nice big eyes which show up well at lower magnifications. The next shot was taken at 2:1 (2x lifesize) but there are much bigger dragon fly out there with even bigger eyes!



By using flash for these I'm able to use a high shutter speed to get sharper pictures handheld but in bright daylight it's possible to get good images handheld without flash and the eye detail can show up in shots taken at less than lifesize.

[sitan1]

Wow fantastic detail, well done.

[mfreg]

very interesting. it's funny, I've always been fascinated by macro / micro photography but I've never done anything to learn how to do it myself. I could spend hours examining the detail in your work but wouldn't have a clue how to go about it. very cool.

[EmOz]

Amazing stuff - I've always loved macro photography, and some of the shots (like the ones above) often leave me wondering whether the scientific world has photos as good as some of the ones hoby photographers seem to produce these days

[daft_biker]

Thanks folks Am not sure if these have any scientific value but they are certainly great fun to shoot.

More recently I've been trying to get frame filling shots of just a compound eye:

That was one of the really big butterflies they have at a local butterfly farm and it didn't seem to care how close I got. You can make out the shape of each of the bits of the compund eye in the full size version but that may be a bit lost on this web version.

Also, nowt wrong with a bit of cropping if you need to.....these eye are quite small so unless you have a set of bellows and a reversed lens or something you're probably going to need to crop to show the eye detail in web size pics. Some of these were shot at 5:1 and I still needed to crop some!

[anthonybeard]

wow these are all really cool... makes me want a macro lens.

[Roger Dodger]

Outstanding. Until you see good macros like these, you have no idea how complicated these insects are. My lens gives 1:1, but I haven't gotten any of the compound eyes as sharp as you have. Gives me inspiration. Thanks!