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Veeery little critters

Started 10 months ago | Photos thread
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philzucker
philzucker Forum Pro • Posts: 10,390
Veeery little critters
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Spent some time looking in my garden looking for some very little (only a few mm large) critters and - not surprisingly - found some! Here some of the guests, not all of them wanted, I have to say ...

#1 is a winged aphid that I found - of course - on a stem of a bush rose:

#2 is a shiny and innocent looking rosemary beetle that was nibbling away at the  budding lavender (the second type of plant it infests and devours). Formerly native to the Mediterranean only it now is unfortunately quite common also in Germany:

I don't know what it is doing at its back - I hope it isn't laying eggs for further offspring, but I can't exclude it.

Finally #3, an aphid's worst nightmare in the making, a ladybug in its larvae state, also found on the lavender:

Quite a spiky fellow, isn't it?

All three hand held captures. Taken with a Sony A7R2 with an Tamron 90mm lens sitting on a Kenko Macro 2x Tele converter with its own helicoid. Lens and converter were both fully extended, giving a magnification of roughly 3:1. For illumination I used two Godox MF12 macro flashes with diffusers - they operate wirelessly, so the combination is very easy to use. Aperture was between 16 and 22 (effective aperture hard to calculate, I guess about 50) to get usable DOF at this magnification level. Sharpness lost due to diffraction was regained in PP using mainly Topaz Sharpen AI.

This "Go for DOF and deal with diffraction later" approach was inspired by Nick's (gardenerassistant) fabulous work he regularly posts in this forum!

Phil

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