Non biting Midge

[racketman]

stack from 2 images, quite pleased as I only had use of pop up flash with 60EFS

http://www.pbase.com/image/74449612.jpg

[dpastern]

nice 'n' sharp, but the angle is awkward. How big was this sucker? I think I captured a large male midge a week or so ago, looks very similar to this. I wasn't sure what it was...

Dave

[racketman]

they are about 8mm body length so decent size. I couldnt get much angle as it was sunning itself at the corner of a wall.

[dpastern]

mmm this one was closer to 1.4/1.5mm in length...maybe not a midge...will find and post later...

Dave

[racketman]

Like I said I had about as much room to manouevre as a turkey in a Bernard Matthews shed but I did manage this side effort:

http://www.pbase.com/racketman/image/74454275.jpg

3 shot stack

[LordV]

Agree with dave- good sharp shots but the angles are rather odd- think #2 works better than #1
Brian V.

[BigAl-SA]

Nice one RM. What you could have tried is to get the midge along the diagonal (ie turned the camera through 45°). If I'm not wearing specs, I find I can still peep through the viewfinder, in a situation like this, without moving my body.

[dpastern]

Prefer #2. Sometimes, I hold my camera away from my body, by a foot or more, viewing the viewfinder from a distance and focusing that way. It takes a bit of practice, but it can be done, and can offer good shots. Framing is the hard part, since you usually can't see the entire frame of the viewfinder. Here's the insect that I grabbed a shot of a week or so ago that I was talking about RM.

Dave

edit: excuse the 2nd image, was taken at 1/125 f5.6 ISO 1600 and looks $hite (exposure was about right, wasn't underexposed), even with having used Neat Image to try and clean up the noise...you can see slight banding effects etc, that are common with the 1D. Things get even uglier with the 1D if you underexpose the image, especially in darker areas of the image...

[racketman]

could be a fancy species of non biting midge - lovely legs and some serious mouthparts.

[LordV]

Think Dave's shots must be a mossy with those mouth parts
Brian V.

[dpastern]

Yeah, could well be. I did think about that. The odd thing was it's size, it was huge (as you can tell by the uncropped image). It just stayed there on the bark for near 20 mins plus. Didn't try to bite me or anything, which is really unusual for mozzies, as they usually think I'm an all you can eat buffet lol.

Dave

edit: It's unusual that mozzies like me so much, since my blood temperature is on the low average, hovering around 36ºc, and mozzies are attracted to body heat (which is generated by blood temperature indirectly anyways)...