I enjoy taking macro photos of insects. The results I've had varied from terrible to pretty good. I decided to use some of my experience photographing fishing flys to photographing the real thing. Not for the off hand shots that will always happen but for those times when observing insects is the primary goal.

Goals are:

  1. Portable
  2. Anti-shake
  3. Natural or Artificial lighting
  4. A container to hold the bug(s)
    5. and, oh yeah
  5. A metric scale always in the picture.

I decided a starting point was the upper portion of the one holer That solved requirements 1 and 3. I needed to attach it to a bug container of some type. A shallow dish had some appeal but experience said it would be better to have something with more depth. A trip to the dollar store netted me 4 small square containers with lids no less. Requirement 4 met.

Another piece of scrap, 4 holes carefully drilled for corners, saw between the holes, a bit of work with a rasp and a nice fit for the plastic container to slip into. Now to attach the lower bit to the upper camera mount board. Wood would work but I wanted as much light as possible so I found some clear acrylic plastic left over from another project. Everything shaking together equals no-shake and the plastic allows as much natural light as possible. Requirement 1 satisfied.

And a picture using the LED ring:

I wanted to have a metric scale in the cup; I was always forgetting to include one in the photo. I didn't have one handy, so I made one by writing a simple program to write the necessary codes to my printer. After I verified the spacing I printed it on some overhead projector acetate. If you don't know how to control your printer you're really missing out. Here , on the left, is how that scale turned out:

One thing I see in taking the pictures is that I better paint this white. When I glued the rules to the containers everything went fine until I decided to test things and the glue had not set ... damn! Oh well, I have as many more metric rules as I want to print and 3 more containers before I need to make another trip to the dollar store. Beside, I'm sure that there will be a Mk-II, then a Mk-III .... Not perfect but close enough.

Here's a picture taken using the set up shown using the LED rig light and after I solved the gluing problem of the scales.

It's winter now, so there's no real bug collecting. I can hardly wait until spring to try it on the real critters!