Getting Small Creatures to Hold Still

Which brings us to the big problem – getting the insects to hold still long enough for a picture. It is extremely frustrating, because the live ones start walking just as you are ready to shoot, while dead ones look, well, dead. It helps a lot to put them in the refrigerator for an hour or two to put them into torpor before starting a photographing session — although this doesn’t always work around here, because our climate is cold enough that a lot of arthropods have adapted to be active at temperatures right down to freezing. It might be possible to anesthetize them with carbon dioxide (a trick that is used in “instrumental insemination” of queen honey bees), I’m thinking of rigging up some sort of CO2 generator with vinegar and baking soda to try this.

Of course, chilling or anesthetizing insects tends to make them take very unnatural poses.  Which generally not only looks funny, but also makes it hard to compare with actual live ones.  The only real solution to this is a combination of patience, and taking advantage of the natural habits of insects.  When dealing with ants, Alex Wild has a bunch of tips to help in getting clear shots – (1) Stake out the nest entrance and photograph them when they first come out and pause for a second to orient themselves; (2) Give them a drop of sugar water that they will pause at to drink; (3) Put a lens cap or jar lid over them until they calm down, then line up for your shots and remove the cover – and then take pictures as fast as you can before they start running around again; (4) Keep a colony of ants in a transparent container so that they can be photographed at will; (5) In dry environments, leave a drop of moisture for thirsty ants; (6) Get them good and mad so that they will start making threat displays at your camera; (7) Make them run and run and run and run until they are too tired to go on, and then just photograph them while they rest; and (8) Set up a runway and then try to just pan the camera along to track them on-the-fly. Most of these techniques will work to some extent with other small arthropods (for example, jumping spiders can usually be annoyed into making a threat display at the camera that shows off their lovely big eyes).

A couple of additional things that I have noticed: (1) Beetles, especially large beetles, hate to sit still on flat, smooth surfaces, but will often perch contentedly on rounded, rough surfaces, like your finger. (2) You can get featherweight forceps from BioQuip for about $5 that are very nice for holding on to particularly stubborn specimens. These forceps are very flexible, so you can firmly grip a small arthropod without crushing it. It sure does make them mad, though. (3) Aquatic insects are actually fairly easy, as long as you can get a small, shallow container (like a jar lid) to fill with water. (4) A lot of visually-oriented insects, like dragonflies and robber flies, are mainly sensitive to sideways motion. So, if you creep up on them by moving sloooowly straight in without any sideways motion, they will frequently let you move right up close enough for a shot. And if you do spook them, if you hold still and wait a couple of minutes they are likely to come back to the same perch. similarly, spiders on webs can be crept up on as long as you don’t twang any of the silk lines in the web. And of course, (5) If you leave a porch light on all night, and then come out in the cool of the early morning, you can generally have your pick of nocturnal insects that are now roosting on the walls, and are practically comatose.

One Response leave one →
  1. July 4, 2012

    Excellent suggestions here! Thanks!

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