An assortment of insects

[rjlittlefield]

These are from a short trip to the mountains yesterday, just for fun. I considered not even taking a camera, except for the one in my cell phone, which device would otherwise have no purpose. But in the end I relented and took my venerable Canon A710 IS compact point-and-shoot. These are from that, auto-everything in macro focusing mode.

I flipped over some fern fronds looking for sori, but it turned out to be too early to get ripe brown ones. I thought these were green young ones, until I looked closer...



Somehow I never thought of ferns having trouble with aphids.

This little predacious bug was pretty simple to see. The prey in this first shot looks like what remains of a spittlebug, which were pretty common among those green leaves.



Here's a different view of the same bug. I was saddened to see that at some point I had apparently bothered the critter enough to make it drop its lunch.



For other critters, I was lunch. These two flies were quite harmless, however. All they wanted was some sweat.





Cheers!

--Rik

[Carmen]

Rik, great for a point and shoot camera! I vote for N° 3 as best of the lot!

[DeVil]

Very nice set, esp taken with Canon A710

[rjlittlefield]

Carmen & Predrag, thanks for dropping by. I'm glad you enjoyed these images.

I think a lot of people underestimate the usefulness of compact point-and-shoot for macro work.

They certainly do have the big limitation that you have to get close to your subject.

But in exchange, they naturally provide an up-close-and-personal wide angle perspective. The A710 with no additional lenses will fill the frame with a subject that is only 24 mm wide, equivalent to almost 1:1 using an APS-C sensor. Further, it accomplishes that with no reduction in the angle of view, about 56 degrees across the width of the frame. For comparison, that field of view is about the same as a 21 mm lens on APS-C.

This makes it very simple to include large amounts of background, which can be very useful for context. See for example the images HERE, HERE, and HERE.

With the addition of a Raynox close-up lens, and used at a telephoto setting, it can be made to work at somewhat longer distances while still capturing small subjects with pretty good quality. See HERE and HERE for more about that.

But of course, the huge advantage of a compact point-and-shoot is that it's much smaller and lighter than a DSLR. I simply gave up carrying my DSLR when backpacking, but the A710 just clips on my belt and is always there.

--Rik