insects

I’ve been taking photos for a long time. That said, I got into the bad habit of taking tons of disjointed photos. That is, I was not thinking of my work as project-based nor was I using my photos to really tell stories. Over the last few years, however, I’ve engaged in more project-based work. Last summer, I created several photo stories of various insects and this summer, I tried something entirely new – a photo series depicting insects and spiders awakening to the sunrise.

Last year, Olympus Singapore loaned me a pre-launch unit of their new STF-8 Macro Twin Flash, together with their OM-D E-M1 and M.Zuiko Digital ED 60mm f/2.8 Macro for a test-run in the field. I've had the set for about a week -- it was easy to use and the results were pretty good, although it took some time for me to get used to focusing using the LCD.

Fine Art photographer Pascal Goet has been capturing macro photos for 26 years, but it's only today that his work made its way onto our radar. His series Mask & Totem features some of the most colorful, anthropomorphic insects he's photographed—insects that looks like mysterious, intricate masks.

Want to see the face of the tiny insects that live in your home? For his project "Suburban Symbiosis: Insectum domesticus," photographer Daniel Kariko shot close-up portraits of common household insects. The images are gorgeous... and terrifying.

Back in April, the Chinese camera gear maker Venus announced its new KX800 macro twin flash, which looks like an external flash unit with three tentacles bursting forth from the top.

Photographer Thomas Shahan, the "Bob Ross of bug shots," got his hand on an early unit and just released this 6-minute hands-on review.

If you’re looking for an inexpensive way to achieve high magnification in your photography, you need to know about the reverse lens macro photography technique. Reverse lens macro photography has allowed me to achieve the magnification I couldn’t come close to with my more expensive equipment.

A team at the University of Texas is set to create thousands of macro photographs showing the beauty and diversity of the smallest critters in the state of Texas. Every one of the photos will be released to the public domain, allowing anyone to do anything with the photos without charge (or even permission).

Nicky Bay is a Singapore-based photographer who captures the beauty and diversity of insects in Singapore's rainforests through macro photography. He made 46 trips out into the wild in 2014, capturing tens of thousands of photographs and sharing thousands of photos online.

Italian photographer Alberto Ghizzi Panizza has spent the past ten years perfecting his particular brand of macro photography. Specifically, Panizza has nailed down the niche of capturing macro photographs of flowers as refracted in minuscule drops of dew, oftentimes on insects.

Once in a while we stumble across a great archive of public domain or creative commons imagery that just blows us away. Sometimes it's historical photos, other times beautiful photos from space, but this time around it's neither.

Thanks to the US Geological Survey's Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab Flickr, we now have access to over 1,200 gorgeous macro photos of bees and other insects.

There are DIY projects that just about anybody can do -- for example, turning an old film canister into a flashlight -- and there are DIY projects that have a very specific "Y" in mind.

The ArnoSync High-Speed photography rig falls into the latter category. But even if you don't have the engineering prowess to build it yourself, it's still worth taking a look at what this home-brew rig can do.

Want to see some action-packed photographs on a really small scale? Look no further than photographer Alex Wild's collection of photos titled "Ants Fighting." It's a series of macro photographs showing various species of ants engaged in intense battles to the death.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Belgian photographer fotoopa (“photo grandpa” in Dutch) …