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Mosquito with mites
Mosquito with mites

Taken very late at night last summer using a macro bracket I made especially for night shooting. This is a mosquito with mites sitting on my basement bulkhead door, outside below my kitchen window. I was trying out the bracket using a pre-aimed LED flashlight as a focus-assist light, hunting for Nursery Web Spiders. There were loads of mosquitoes around, some landing and biting any time I remained still to pop off a shot at a spider. I was working under a security light and noticed one mosquito seemed to have a small pin-point of red on it, becoming visible when it turned a certain way. When It settled on the door I was able to examine it through the viewfinder and noticed it was carrying several mites. The lens I was using... a 105mm f/2.5 Nikkor, wasn't going to provide enough magnification so I hurried indoors to rig up something that would... an older 200mm Micro-Nikkor (1981). Fitting it with a 20x Nikon industrial "Profile-Projector" lens got me the magnification I wanted. I returned outside and found... nothing. The mosquito had flown and what might have been a decent shot flew away with it. A half hour later I was working with the 200mm / 20x lens set-up on a small funnel web spider and found the same mosquito had returned, settling on a different spot on the door. Popping off one shot spooked the mosquito, sending it and its mites off into the night.

This image required a significant amount of work to make it halfway presentable. In my haste to rig up the lens combination used, I had mounted the Profile-projector lens a bit "skewed". The 52mm empty filter ring I had fitted it with was made of a kind of very hard plastic, and as a result was slightly cross-threaded when I hurriedly screwed it onto the 200mm. The resulting image was soft and suffered from a heavy dose of chromatic aberration, making the pic nearly a "throw-away". A great deal of cloning and selective desaturation was needed to get it to where it is. The plastic ring was tossed and replaced with a metal one.

Nikon D40, 200mm f/4 Micro-Nikkor set at f22, focused at infinity, with a Nikon 20x "Profile-Projector" lens mounted on the 200mm. Speed 1/2000 sec. Lighting provided by an SB-23 Speedlight flashed through a "mini" diffuser made from the white plastic bowl that comes in a "Healthy Choice" frozen dinner.

DSC-3259

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Taken on: July 1, 2018
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Sets appears in:   • Mites    • Mosquitos   
Groups appears in:   • Macro Studies    • Insects & Spiders    more » • Manual Focus    • Mosquito shots    • Macro! Macro!! Macro!!!    • Macro! Closeup Shots!    • Nikon D40 Worldwide    • Micro-Nikkor 200mm f/4.0    • Macro & Close up Photography    « less
Camera: Nikon D40, f/0, 1/2000 sec, 0mm, ISO 400 (more info) (hide info)
Camera: Nikon D40
Aperture: f/0
Exposure Time: 0.001 sec (1/2000)
Focal Length: 0mm
ISO: 400
Exposure Bias: 0 EV
Flash: No Flash
Exposure Program: Manual
Exposure Mode: Manual
Metering Mode: Center-weighted average
White Balance: Auto
Gain Control: Low gain up
Color Space: sRGB
Software: Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 Macintosh
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Mosquito with mites

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