As I reported a while back, I bought some insects online. Today I played a bit with photographing a cicada in different ways.
A Tosena Splendida, photographed with back lighting.
One of the insects I got was a Tosena Splendida from Thailand. This was the largest insect in the pack. The wingspan is 13 cm. It has a rather dark, solid body and partially transparent wings. That was a bit of a challenge when photographing it. I put my LED light under a glass plate and put a piece of white paper on top of the glass. That resulted in nice even white light. I then placed the insect on top of it. This worked great to see the transparent wings. But the body became almost completely black. To solve this, I added a smaller, directional LED light on top of it. That brought back part of the details and colors in the back. Using some post processing I could locally lighten the body a bit, resulting in the image above.
When photographing these prepared insects you can also shoot nice abstracts details of them, like the image of a small part of the wing above, again using backlight to bring out the patterns and and colors.
It is fun to try out different methods of lighting, especially now that it is so dark outside.
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