Stag Beetle Shots

July 14, 2009 thepatter 0 Comments

A couple of nights ago my wife told me there was a big, ugly bug outside next to the front door.  She wasn’t referring to a gaudily decorated VW, but instead I found what turned out to be a stag beetle.  Naturally, I could not pass up the chance to shoot something so weird looking, so I gathered up my gear and went out to the front porch.  At first I just shot it in place, hanging on a piece of trim around siding.  I mean, IT was hanging on a piece of trim around the siding.  I wasn’t. I was standing on the deck.  Anyway, grammar issues aside, that wasn’t really yielding anything too interesting, so I started looking around to see what else I could try.

I decided to use a small, glass topped table we have on the porch.  I went inside, grabbed a piece of  printer paper and some foam core.  I placed a flash under the glass table and set my camera on the tripod.  Now, it was dark and I use a manual focus 50mm lens with extension tubes for macro shots.  That meant a lot of opening up the aperture, focusing, stopping back down to f/8 or so and shooting.  Oh, and I was holding the foam core directly over the beetle to bounce light back down onto it so it wasn’t just a silhouette.  Meanwhile, the beetle is moving around, so I had to constantly reset everything.  Still, I thought a couple of the shots came out pretty cool.

My Model is Uglier than Your Model 

  Stag Beetle

 

 

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For those of you who like set up shots, here it is.  I’m not sure what I was thinking, but I went crazy with the labels.  If you can’t identify a tripod without help, then this is for you:

 Setup