Photographer Nicolas Reusens has always been interested in insects, so when he purchased his first DSLR three years ago, he immediately dove into the art of macro photography. By using the technique known as focus stacking — combining several images taken at different depths of field — he’s generated some truly eye-popping photos of creepy crawlies from all over the world. Read more…

Back in 2010, we featured the beautiful macro bug photographs of a Belgian photographer named Frans, who uses a custom laser camera rig to capture insects mid-flight. Inspired by fotoopa’s work, biochemist and photography enthusiast Linden Gledhill decided to pursue the same photographic subject.
Read more…

Dmitriy Yoav Reinshtein is a 26-year-old photographer based in Tel Aviv, Israel. He works as an advertising photographer and creative retoucher, but one of his personal passions is shooting highly detailed macro photographs of tiny insects. While all of his macro photographs are amazing to look all, there’s a particular subset that caught our eye: Reinshtein managed to capture a number of insects with water drops sitting on their top of their heads.
Read more…

Bob Ross became a household name a couple of decades ago through his show The Joy of Painting on PBS. His friendly personality, soothing voice, and artistic talent got countless people hooked on oil painting, beating the devil out of paintbrushes, and creating happy little trees and clouds. He’s the kind of guy who could (and did) talk about watching paint dry and make it enjoyable.

Thomas Shahan is the closest thing we’ve found so far to a photographic Bob Ross. In the video above, he introduces us to the art of high-magnification macro photography, which he employs to create vibrant images of all kinds of tiny critters.
Read more…

French photographer David Chambon is a master of macro insect photography. An amateur photographer for over 10 years, his goal is to capture the magical beauty of nature through his imagery. All of his macro shots are amazing, but it’s his morning dew series that stands out from the rest. He ventures out early in the morning, and photographs various insects perched on flowers and leaves, glowing from the tiny beads of dew that coat their bodies.
Read more…

Malaysian photographer Peiling Lee captures beautiful, dreamlike macro photographs of tiny critters she finds in her garden. She uses a Canon 50D and a 100mm Macro lens. Her work reminds us of Nadav Bagim’s Wonderland project that we shared last year.
Read more…

Digital Photo Blog shot these beautiful long exposure photographs of gold fireflies in Japan during the June to July rainy season, when they come together to mate.
Read more…

The photographs in Nadav Bagim‘s project “WonderLand” might look like paintings or computer generated images, but they’re actually real photographs captured at home using ordinary objects and creative artificial lighting. His tools and props include things like vegetables, plastic bags, flowers, and leaves, and he captures the images using a Canon 60D and 100mm f/2.8 macro lens. Getting his “subjects” into the positions and poses he wants requires countless hours of patient encouraging.
Read more…

Belgian photographer fotoopa (“photo grandpa” in Dutch) shoots ultra-high speed photographs with laser rigs he builds himself. He tells us:

I’m retired, and work inside in the winter making high-speed pictures of water figures. In the springtime and summer I’m outside to capturing insects in-flight. I have a mechanics (15 years experience) and electronics (26 years) background, but photography was always my hobby.

All of my equipment is do-it-yourself. Macro photography has always been one of my favorite types of photography.

Descriptions and diagrams of his rigs are posted for 2008 and 2009. Here’s a glimpse at one of his setups:

To capture insects in flight, his rig detects the insects using two crossed laser beams. This causes a “superfast electro magnet” to trigger the shutter, which opens and closes in less than 5 milliseconds. Shooting at f/22 and ISO 100, he uses 2 or 3 external flashes at minimum power to obtain sufficient light at so short a shutter speed. He adds,

For insects in-flight, a special second shutter system provides the short shutter-lag of ~7 msec necessary. There is also a high-tech IR laser system with an extra third macro-lens and internal AVR controller. In 40 microseconds, this system sees (via the reflected IR light into the detector lens) if an object comes in focus, and give the information to the central CPLD hardware controller that drive the whole system. In this manner even very fast moving insects are in perfect focus in the picture frame.

In the winter, the water figures are done indoors. First done in 2004, I covered a speaker with a membrane, and put a digital wave through it to move the fine colored droplets on the membrane. This provides wonderful images and an unlimited number of possibilities.

For 2010 I built a 3D stereo setup to capture all the high-speed macro pictures in 3D. The setup uses 2 DSLR Nikon cameras, the D200 and D300

To see more of these amazing photographs, you can check out fotoopa on Flickr or on pbase.

(via MAKE)

Image credit: Photographs by fotoopa and used with permission.