While working on my house today, I spotted this June Bug beetle on my front porch. Since I’d been itching to take some pictures, and things have been a little busy lately preventing me from getting my Nikon D200 out, I thought this would be a good time to take a break and check to see if my camera still worked.

I brought the little guy into the house and set-up 2 Nikon SB-800 Speedlights, and my Nikkor 105mm Micro lens. I attached a couple of Kenko extension-tubes to the 105mm Micro Nikkor because I wanted to get in closer than the 1:1 reproduction available from the unaided macro-lens.

(if you missed it, check out our multi-part series on Macro-photography here )

He was alive, but very cooperative as I shot him from all angles, and up close. He was also big enough that I could use Auto-focus on most of the shots. The Nikon SB800’s were triggered by the built-in flash on my D200, set on commander-mode.

I set one of the flashes on channel-B and set it to expose 2-stops under, giving me more detail from the first-flash which was side-lighting the junebug.

One tends to think of beetles, in general, as being pretty slick and hairless, but as you can see, this little guy was plenty fuzzy and even had gobs of armpit hair (French maybe?).

The claws on his legs look pretty menacing up close and would work well in a Godzilla movie.

After about 10-to-15 minutes of posing, and being relatively still, the hairy little guy figured he’d had enough of this photo op.

He tilted his head sideways, and turned around, and walked off of my carefully crafted stage.

Since he’d been good for such a long time, I helped him find his way back to the great outdoors.

All the shots were taken with: Nikon D200 (set on manual), 2 Nikon SB-800 Speedlights, a Nikon 105mm Micro lens,Kenko Auto extension tubes, handheld.

When you get a chance, check out this article in the New York Times (Click here) on a show on WeeGee…cool stuff! Go back in our achives and check out our article on WeeGee (click here).
“Unknown Weegee” remains through Aug. 27 at the International Center of Photography, 1133 Avenue of the Americas, at 43rd Street, (212) 857-0000.

New no-glare ink-jet paper!-Also from the Times, comes an article about a new (but not cheap) no-glare ink-jet paper (click here)