The subject was an Anystis sp. which I found on a collection of tires (in white plastice bags) left laying outdoors. They usually run around frantically so I was curious when it stopped and I had an angle on it. I keep a solid mini tripod attached to my Canon G11 so I sat down by the tires and propped the camera on my leg and against the tires. I could adjust focus by leaning harder on the tire and I tried to find the mouthparts. The flash bounced off the background and back to the lens, a technique I've found to give interesting results. The lens attachment is a hack from a Super 8 video camera which gives about 6-7X macro and I keep the camera lens focused at infinity (which may also be why the hacked lens works) and set to f11. I have never concerned myself with the vignetting or sagital astigmatism in the background as I was only interested in exploring and posting on bugguide which only requires 560 pixels.
The chelicerae on these mites have a regressesed digit so the lower digit appears as a large tooth.
I have yet to learn how to control file size on animated GIF's so you'll have to go over to Flickr for the video where you'll see this little critter sucking up a drop of fluid. I was shooting an image every four or five seconds and the six image scene covers a total time span of 22 seconds. I hope you enjoy.
https://bugguide.net/node/view/1191181
https://www.flickr.com/photos/60839073@ ... otostream/
