Mosquito with mites
Taken very late at night last summer using a macro bracket I made especially for night shooting. This is a mosquito with mites sitting on my basement bulkhead door, outside below my kitchen window. I was trying out the bracket using a pre-aimed LED flashlight as a focus-assist light, hunting for Nursery Web Spiders. There were loads of mosquitoes around, some landing and biting any time I remained still to pop off a shot at a spider. I was working under a security light and noticed one mosquito seemed to have a small pin-point of red on it, becoming visible when it turned a certain way. When It settled on the door I was able to examine it through the viewfinder and noticed it was carrying several mites. The lens I was using... a 105mm f/2.5 Nikkor, wasn't going to provide enough magnification so I hurried indoors to rig up something that would... an older 200mm Micro-Nikkor (1981). Fitting it with a 20x Nikon industrial "Profile-Projector" lens got me the magnification I wanted. I returned outside and found... nothing. The mosquito had flown and what might have been a decent shot flew away with it. A half hour later I was working with the 200mm / 20x lens set-up on a small funnel web spider and found the same mosquito had returned, settling on a different spot on the door. Popping off one shot spooked the mosquito, sending it and its mites off into the night.
This image required a significant amount of work to make it halfway presentable. In my haste to rig up the lens combination used, I had mounted the Profile-projector lens a bit "skewed". The 52mm empty filter ring I had fitted it with was made of a kind of very hard plastic, and as a result was slightly cross-threaded when I hurriedly screwed it onto the 200mm. The resulting image was soft and suffered from a heavy dose of chromatic aberration, making the pic nearly a "throw-away". A great deal of cloning and selective desaturation was needed to get it to where it is. The plastic ring was tossed and replaced with a metal one.
Nikon D40, 200mm f/4 Micro-Nikkor set at f22, focused at infinity, with a Nikon 20x "Profile-Projector" lens mounted on the 200mm. Speed 1/2000 sec. Lighting provided by an SB-23 Speedlight flashed through a "mini" diffuser made from the white plastic bowl that comes in a "Healthy Choice" frozen dinner.
DSC-3259
Mosquito with mites
Taken very late at night last summer using a macro bracket I made especially for night shooting. This is a mosquito with mites sitting on my basement bulkhead door, outside below my kitchen window. I was trying out the bracket using a pre-aimed LED flashlight as a focus-assist light, hunting for Nursery Web Spiders. There were loads of mosquitoes around, some landing and biting any time I remained still to pop off a shot at a spider. I was working under a security light and noticed one mosquito seemed to have a small pin-point of red on it, becoming visible when it turned a certain way. When It settled on the door I was able to examine it through the viewfinder and noticed it was carrying several mites. The lens I was using... a 105mm f/2.5 Nikkor, wasn't going to provide enough magnification so I hurried indoors to rig up something that would... an older 200mm Micro-Nikkor (1981). Fitting it with a 20x Nikon industrial "Profile-Projector" lens got me the magnification I wanted. I returned outside and found... nothing. The mosquito had flown and what might have been a decent shot flew away with it. A half hour later I was working with the 200mm / 20x lens set-up on a small funnel web spider and found the same mosquito had returned, settling on a different spot on the door. Popping off one shot spooked the mosquito, sending it and its mites off into the night.
This image required a significant amount of work to make it halfway presentable. In my haste to rig up the lens combination used, I had mounted the Profile-projector lens a bit "skewed". The 52mm empty filter ring I had fitted it with was made of a kind of very hard plastic, and as a result was slightly cross-threaded when I hurriedly screwed it onto the 200mm. The resulting image was soft and suffered from a heavy dose of chromatic aberration, making the pic nearly a "throw-away". A great deal of cloning and selective desaturation was needed to get it to where it is. The plastic ring was tossed and replaced with a metal one.
Nikon D40, 200mm f/4 Micro-Nikkor set at f22, focused at infinity, with a Nikon 20x "Profile-Projector" lens mounted on the 200mm. Speed 1/2000 sec. Lighting provided by an SB-23 Speedlight flashed through a "mini" diffuser made from the white plastic bowl that comes in a "Healthy Choice" frozen dinner.
DSC-3259