Flies on fungus on log

[rjlittlefield]

These little critters were very focused on whatever they were doing on this fungus on the end of a rotting log. They didn't seem to mind at all when the flash kept going off in their face. (Of course that might be a tribute to the wimpy flash I was using...)

Fly body length 3.8 mm.











Canon A710 IS camera. The closeups are augmented with the Raynox 250 setup shown HERE, except that in this case it was just on-camera flash through a white cloth.

I was glad that I shot some natural light images as well. Somehow the camera got pretty confused about automatic color balancing in this mixed-light situation. It ended up making a lot of my images look like they had been illuminated by candlelight, even though the only light sources around were daylight shade and electronic flash. Perhaps a lot of illumination got reflected off my hand?? I corrected those images as best I could here, but the correction was large and there are some color artifacts especially in near-whites. This camera doesn't shoot raw, only JPEG, so it's challenging to make big corrections in post-processing.

--Rik