Millipede
It’s spring! I no longer have to find arthropods under junk in the basement! Now the biggest issue in photographing them is speed - most insects, spiders, and centipedes move so quick that it’s hard to get a picture. I tried to get pictures of a ground beetle, a centipede, any of the thousands of flies that were popping out of hibernation, and a moth, and ended up with a lot of pictures either of fast-moving blurs, or of vacant spots where my subjects had been up until just a second ago.
Except for this one. This is a millipede, and based on the image at BugGuide [1], it is a member of the family Parajulidae. It was moving nice and slow, and allowed me to move it somewhere that there was good contrast, decent lighting [2], and nothing to hide behind.
[1] BugGuide was pointed out to me by the folks at the entomology interest group. I expect that my little arthropod identification project is going to mean I use it a lot.
[2] Even so, there were some problems with the shadows. I’m starting to think that the best way to do this might be to come up with a combined capture box/light box setup, so that whatever critter I’m looking at will (a) be kept from getting away; (b) be resting at a suitable focal distance, and (c) uniformly illuminated. Something as simple as a jar with a piece of card-stock in the bottom, a flashlight to fill in the shadows, and a mouth small enough that the camera lens corks it, might just do the trick.
K T Cat:
Thanks for the link to BugGuide! Another way cool story of learning how to photograph these beasties.
21 December 2007, 11:08 am