Alex Wild photobombs an assassin shot!

No, it is not as exotic or insect-laden as Belize, but when you have a great instructor and some packages of insects, you can learn a lot about photographing the smaller creatures if Alex Wild is your instructor!

This workshop Mike and I attended yesterday was put on in association with the Entomological Society of Canada Annual Meeting in Guelph Ontario. The workshop was designed to cover the basics of insect macrophotography, and as such a lot of the material was not new to me, but watching a professional instructor was! I was surprised how casual he seemed delivering the basics, with a friendly and casual manner that made everything go down smooth among the mixed skill-level audience.

I even learned a thing or two, with the light-box technique producing amazingly easy and pleasing results with nothing more than three pieces of foamboard and some bounced flashes. To think of all the time I spend littering Adam Blake‘s desk with improvised paper diffusers, when I could have had just a ready made macro box stowed in my desk ready for when I get the urge to shoot a bug!

Unfortunately, it rained pretty hard all afternoon, so we could not go out to the field to practice, but we had some good fun continuing on with our studio techniques. Alex’s approach to teaching is very lighthearted, and it seems he wants to emphasize the fundamentals without pushing a narrow definition of the form.  His tips are simple, yet will yield powerful images if they are followed.

You can see some of the shots I took below, If you are ever in the market for a fun and informative photography workshop, Alex’s course is really a great choice. Thanks go out to Morgan Jackson and Crystal Ernst for all their hard work helping facilitate the course, and of course to Dr. Wild, for helping us start the conference on a high note.

Mike shoots in the foamcore macro setup.

White backdrop on the assassin.

Dropping it off to black.

The grasshopper salutes my improving skill!

A tree cricket!

The froghopper got that orange glow from a piece of paper underneath the branch.

Grasshopper with bluejeans-clad butt as backdrop.

variations.

A brown lacewing looking elegant against black.

A pretty Goldenrod Leaf Beetle.

This widow was perched on a twig with two Lastolites hitting from either end, and the backdrop is a maple outside the window.

Dr. Evil, the Katydid.

Mike contemplates Dr. Evil.

Tonight, Catherine and I are packing, because tomorrow we fly east to attend the Entomological Society of Canada/Entomological Society of Ontario Joint Annual Meeting in Guelph Ontario!

Highlights of this conference will be:

1) A macrophotography workshop with Alex Wild! The forecast for Saturday looks wet and cool, but I have high hopes we will find a few insects outdoors. If not, there will be some studio subjects available. I am sure I will learn a lot, especially about how Alex teaches a course. I am thinking of doing a “photograph your study” workshop at SFU soon, and this will definitely hep!

2) Grant-writing, teaching, plant recognition and job-search workshops throughout the conference. These are all important skills, and a great reason to attend this conference. Catherine and I attended a professional development workshop sponsored by CANPOLIN at SFU this summer, and it was great material! Thanks go out to Dr. Elizabeth Elle for opening it up to other students!

3) A Graduate Student Showcase, which I am honoured to have been invited to! This will give me  20 whole minutes to spread the word about the coolest wasp-eating birds on the planet! The lineup looks great, with talks on Lycaenids, Salticids, Coleophorids and Noctuids!

This should be a great meeting!

Is it just me or do the undergrads look younger every year?

A few years ago, I taught the laboratory for BISC 317, Insect Biology. Much as we impress upon the students to go out and collect hard and often in the few short weeks of summer left to them, they are usually slow to do so, so to help them out, the instructors take them on a collecting trip. This is a voluntary field trip that the instructors organize solely for the students’ sake, and it allows them to get a few orders in their collections they might not yet have found, such as stoneflies, mayflies and odonates.  We go out to UBC’s Malcolm Knapp research forest, and hit both a pond and a stream habitat.

This year, Bekka Brodie and Antonia Musso are teaching the course, and I went along for the fun of it. I taught the course when Antonia took it, so it was great to see her out there leading the undergrads around. Bekka is the senior entomologist, having come from a Masters where she worked on Longhorns in the US, and she brought along Tavi, our favourite budding truck enthusiast/entomologist.

Bekka wrangles supplies and students

A veritable invasion of entomologists hits the shores of the pond.

We use dollar store nets for aquatic insects. they work pretty well!

Antonia explaining the superabundance of chironomid larvae.

Antonia figures out the quirky wash bottle.

Hoping for a mayfly…

Collaborative netting.

Searching for 3 caudal filaments.

Preservation in ethanol is the next step.

Another forest invertebrate.

Ah yes! A fat juicy stonefly, freshly plucked from the stream!

A whopping corydalid larva!

Tavi had all the netting he could handle and made his escape. Viorel is not amused.

On the way back, Viorel, Tavi and I checked out some honey mushrooms on a maple at a nearby river.

With some salmon in the water…

…and some on land as bear food!