Here is another angle of the same guy. This one is taken with the 2.7x magnification. Same gear as above.

Thanks backyardfarmer. how close to this jumping spider did you get to take the shot I just checked, the lens (MP-E 65) was set to 3.0x magnification, and at 3x magnification the working distance is 51mm (2 inches). In practice I've macro flash attached to the front of the lens and I have diffusers ...

Thanks! :) Some of the color tones are there because of the slightly tinted twin flashes I use. As you can see from the reflections of the diffusers on the spider's eyes, the left flash is slightly blue tinted and the right one has a slight yellow-orange tint. This gives a sun&sky like illumination ...

A jumping spider sitting on our garbage bin. Click the image for the higher resolution version.



Canon 7D mk2 body
Canon MP-E 65 lens
Canon MT-24ex flash with home-made diffusers

I named this as Pluto as this guy has a heart shape on its body just like the recent Pluto images. Click the image for the higher resolution version.



Canon 7D body
Canon MP-E 65 lens
Canon MT-24ex flash with home-made diffusers

rjlittlefield, I totally agree about the blue stripe. I wish I could find an angle to get uniform blue background. Not sure myself about the egg keeping behavior. What I've seen so far is that most egg sacks are usually accompanied by an adult spider (assuming female). I don't think that I've seen a...

I tried 4-5 different setups and this is what I liked the best: It's nothing fancy and probably not the most transfer efficient one. It's a two layer diffuser, first layer is a commercial plastic cap similar to this one. . These plastic caps also let you drop-in some color filters for adjusting the ...

This spider built a small sack around the eggs on one of our kitchen blinder blades. Comments and critics are welcome.




Canon 7D body
Canon MP-E 65 lens
Canon MT-24ex flash with home-made diffusers
Lightroom

Not the best day of the little aphid...

Canon 7D body
Canon MP-E 65 lens
Canon MT-24ex flash with home-made diffusers
Lightroom



closeup:

Ah! By "toning" I meant "tone mapping" (i.e. adjusting the response curves). It may not be the correct terminology for photography; for rendering we use "toning" or "tone mapping" for the dynamic range compression operation to preserve the look of a high dynamic lighting in a scene when it's display...

Thanks ChrisR, I'm glad that you liked it. Toning is unavoidable as what the camera captures is not what you perceive when you look at the scene with your naked eye. Since our current display technology is not advanced enough to provide a faithful replica of the intensities and colors of the real sc...

It's that time of year again: everywhere is full of may flies in San Francisco. This guy was resting on our fence. Canon 7D body Canon MP-E 65 lens Canon MT-24ex flash with colored filters and set of home-made diffusers attached Toned in Lightroom https://farm1.staticflickr.com/410/18759234215_a5276...

I found this lady wolf spider in front of our garage. I took few images before she decided to carry away herself and the babies. This is a focus stack of 3 images. Canon 7D body Canon MP-E 65 lens Canon MT-24ex flash with colored filters and set of home-made diffusers attached stacked in Photoshop a...

Here is a time-lapse video of emerging hibiscus pollens. Shot with Canon 7D + Canon MP-E 65 + Canon 430EXII flash at 4x magnification. This video is 1920x1080 crop of the original full frame photos so another 2.6x magnification there. The frame interval is 1min/frame (1800x realtime) in the beginnin...

Thanks everyone for the kind comments.

Yes they eat the cap until the marked line and crawl out. I still need to process that video and share with you, you can see the process there.