Insects and Spiders

They don't attack people for the lols, you can normally handle them fine as long as they don't feel trapped or get caught in clothing.

That's good to know. I left her be but if she's there in a couple of weeks I'll need to re-home.

Get a jar and poke her in with a stick from behind, she should go in quite agreeably, beer mat over the top and take her to a shed or garage to live out the winter. My eldest has a nack for just picking up the bigger ones from behind by their abdomen somehow without squishing or dropping them.

Turns out throwing money at macro stuff and going to Greece on holiday may have paid off.
Learnt a lot and have an overwhelming amount of images to go through + then a lot of focus stacks to work on. But got some pretty good pics straight off the camera.

Back to unpacking bags/re-adjusting to real life before I can justify any more photo stuff. Probably need to work on my lightroom organisation and figure out some sort of workflow for focus stacks.

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Awesome pic. Argh I need a camera, the phone is failing with anything a few cm in length.
None of the 20 odd pics of the elephant hawk moth caterpillar are good. I'll see if a video uploads 🤔

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That's really cool. Where's that? My London garden is so devoid of anything exciting. Was amazing to be somewhere where I could find interesting insects within 5 minutes.

I reckon even using my very nice camera set up I'm generally getting less than one in 20 usable pics.

Two wasps, a seed bug and some sort of grasshopper. South of france

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A forest in Lithuania.
Yeah it's amazing how the snout ruffles around. I startled it at one point and it just froze.

Wasps can get to fucking fuck. Or at least gtf away from me. Just had to remove a nest from my balcony.

Wasps are misunderstood creatures. Unfairly maligned.

Admittedly, I might feel differently if they were nesting on my house.

Love this

They evolved from ants no?

A few more I got round to editing. The cicada head is a stack made from about 30 images - found it drowned in swimming pool so could move it round more.
Not having much luck with handheld stacks so far. I made a stack of the mantis head as well, but it looked worse than this individual still. I'm terrible at keeping a steady hand.

Things I've learnt so far - I should probably get a little macro tripod with a slider thing rather than trying to make do with a beanbag. I should stop ignoring cleaning my lens/sensor. My flash diffuser isn't great - have just bought a can of pringles to DIY a better one out of.

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Also learnt a lot about what level of drowning insects can survive - praying mantises and beetles seem to be able to float around indefinitely and emerge unscathed. Grasshoppers and wasps do worse but sometimes come back to life after a bit of recovery time. Moths and butterflies just die.
(became a temporary insect lifeguard to ease my guilt at having a swimming pool for the week, which has to be a terrible thing enviromentally, particularly as I couldn't get lights to turn off at night, increasing insect casualty rates massively)

Nice elephant hawk moth found in my kitchen…

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Beautiful. Hope I can see one after my caterpillar sighting. Where is this if you don't mind me asking, UK?

Great stuff

Great stuff. The red and black thingamy is pure sci fi.

I think that red&black thing is the exact same species as your seed bug. Somehow I failed to get an in-focus top photo of one showing the actual markings.

Hawk moth is great. All the moths in Greece tended to be dull brown ones and none of the butterflies stayed still for long enough to photograph. Though were also less colourful than British ones.

Can anyone identify this very cool spider? I took about 200 photos of it, none of which I've managed to successfully stack yet.

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Really enjoying the photos.

I'm not too good on spider id but I think it's probably a Pink Crab Spider (Thomisus onustus) see https://www.gbif.org/species/2166135 and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomisus_onustus - it appears to be widely distributed in the Mediterranean

Thank you - that looks like the one. Mine was less pink but looks like their colour changes so that makes sense. Should have found some flowers to put it on.

As a tip, if you want to have a chance of IDing a spider, try and get a photo of the eyes. They are one of the more important classification features: number of eyes, sometime 6 or more usually 8, and their distribution: number of rows and alignment of eyes in each row. Obviously an image focusing on the eyes also makes for a good photo too!

Beautiful. Hope I can see one after my caterpillar sighting. Where is this if you don't mind me asking, UK?

Sure, this was in Chelmsford.

Mad holiday bug time...

House Centipede in Portugal. 😁

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Those things freak me the fuck out. Sci fi, but not in a good way.