I am going to try not to bore you with endless photos I’ve taken with my new camera, but I feel like I want to share a few more this week.  I also don’t have a lot of time to get this blog post up, so it’s going to be photo heavy and text light tonight.  Sometimes that’s just the way life works – I have to work tomorrow!

A friend of mine recently asked about the macro twin light flash that I got for my new camera rig to see how I liked it.  It was just after I’d returned from California and I hadn’t actually had a chance to use it yet, but a request for information like that is the perfect excuse to practice with the new gear!  So, I switched on my porch light, waited a few hours, and headed out to snap a few photos.  I have white siding on my house, which provides this sort of white box-like effect that I enjoyed very much.  Here are a few of my favorites!

Click Beetle

Click beetles are fabulous beetles!  I’ve written about them before, so I’m not going to go into much detail here, but this was one of the smaller click beetles I’ve seen.  I thought it was rather cute!

A Bug

I’ll eventually get to attempting to ID this one (I haven’t ever claimed to be great at sight identification of terrestrial insects!), but for now I’m just calling it a bug because it’s a true bug.  Want to know what makes an insect a bug?  I’ve got a post for that!

Another Bug

Another unidentified bug!  Check out those crazy antennae.  Wow.  This is a beautiful bug, and I might not have noticed it at all if I hadn’t photographed it.  It was rather small and the details weren’t obvious to the naked eye.

Two Lined Spittlebug

These bugs are crazy common in Raleigh!  I see them everywhere in the summer.  I even had one hitch a ride into my house on my shirt the other day.  They’re awfully pretty, for bugs that spend part of their lives hiding in a foam that looks a whole lot like a bubbly loogie.

Scarab

This beetle was hiding under the decorative trim around the front door.  There’s something about insects shot from this perspective, with the insect clinging to a substrate and peering at you from behind it, that I just love.  I know I shouldn’t anthropomorphize like this (bad Dragonfly Woman!), but they just look so friendly!  This beetle would likely be called a June bug by the people of the Midwest (and a few other regions of the US), one of the common brown scarabs you see so many of during the summer.

The trip out to my porch light confirmed two things for me.  First, there is a shocking diversity of insects that come to my regular old compact fluorescent bulb-lit porch!  I hadn’t actually spent much time photographing the insects out there since we moved into the house almost a year ago, but it’s pretty impressive.  Plus, it’s high time I start scaring the neighbors by lurking around my front door and bushes with a camera late at night!  Second, I am very fond of the Canon twin light flash.  I diffused both flashes with a piece of frosted mylar that I got at the last BugShot I attended, and that was all it took to produce some lovely light that filled in the shadows produced by the porch light nicely.

And with that, I think I might head out to snap a few more photos before I go to sleep!

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