Red beetles mating, Green spider, flowers w/ Sigma 150mm

Images of undisturbed subjects in their natural environment. All subject types.

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jeremylavine
Posts: 16
Joined: Sat May 18, 2019 7:13 am
Location: Washington, DC

Red beetles mating, Green spider, flowers w/ Sigma 150mm

Post by jeremylavine »

My first image share here!

These are all from an outing this past Sunday morning in Dumbarton Oaks Park in Georgetown in Washington, DC, with my Sony a6500, Sigma 150mm f/2.8 APO OS EF-mount on MC-11 adapter, and Godox tt685-s speedlight with a small on-flash softbox mounted to a Smallrig articulating arm on the Smallrig cage for the a6500, with a Godox Xpro-s wireless trasmitter on the camera hotshoe triggering the flash. I kept the flash on TTL so that I could freely try different ISO values without having to manually change flash power each time. All hand-held.

Post-processed in Lightroom. I made liberal use of the new "texture" setting, pushing it up possibly to excess. For the last two flower photos, I used the hue sliders to push the greens hue slightly to the colder side, and for the one with the petals open, pushed the yellows slightly to the warmer side.

The spider is a clumsy stack of four images using Photoshop. The stack isn't deep enough, so there is an unnaturally steep transition from in-focus to out-of-focus in the background. The portions on the right side of the image with the spider web in the foreground and the spider in the background were problem areas. I tried cleaning up the layer masks a bit but with limited success.

I think the green spider is a Venusta Orchard Spider.

I have no idea what species the red beetles or flowers are. I might do some more searching.

Species identification, constructive criticism on any aspect, and all other comments are welcome.

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Lou Jost
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Post by Lou Jost »

I vaguely remember those red beetles from my childhood in Wisconsin. Maybe some kind of milkweed associate if memory serves.

rjlittlefield
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Post by rjlittlefield »

Nicely shot!

Yes, these look like "red milkweed beetle", Tetraopes tetrophthalmus, discussed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraopes_tetrophthalmus.

They have an interesting feature that the antenna base completely bisects each eye, hence the description "four eyed".

There are other species with the same feature, but the overall coloration here looks to me like tetrophthalmus.

Lots more images starting at https://bugguide.net/node/view/2966/bgimage .

--Rik

jeremylavine
Posts: 16
Joined: Sat May 18, 2019 7:13 am
Location: Washington, DC

Post by jeremylavine »

Thanks, Rik, for the compliment and the species identification, and thanks Lou for the lead!
They're frisky critters, by the looks of it. E.g. the ménage à trois in the page you linked to - I didn't realize this occurred in other species.

MarkSturtevant
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Post by MarkSturtevant »

Great stuff! I enjoyed this and look forward to seeing more of your posts here.
Mark Sturtevant
Dept. of Still Waters

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