This season I planned to work out an aquatic macro photography setup to take more naturalistic habitus photos of aquatic bugs. My first two efforts crashed and burned, or to be more accurate, leaked. The third attempt is functional but not perfect. The setup consists, simply, of a small transparent food storage box:
My first trial was with a Large Red Damselfly nymph, Pyrrhosoma nymphula, which I fished out of one of my ponds as a test subject. It behaved nicely and I got some reasonable photos, although the quality is not outstanding:
I then moved on to the bugs I planned to photograph, which is where things fell apart. I did get a photo of the rear end of Notonecta viridis, but this shows up the defects in the setup:
Because the subject is close to (touching) the front of the tank, you can see the distortion from the plastic walls in this macro shot, even though the box looks quite clear when I hold it up to the light. This also results in loss of image quality from subjects in the middle of the tank, even though I am not focussed on the front. But then it got worse. I ran into a major problem trying to photograph Corixids. I discovered that Corixids will only pause having rammed themselves into plants or gaps, making it impossible to get clear shots. In a bare container, they just continue to swim manically. So it's back to the old setup, simply photographing Corixids from above in a shallow white ceramic dish of water:
I'll hang on to my cheap plastic setup which will get used occasionally for co-operative subjects.
