Lets start with some caterpillars. First up is a wee little slug caterpillar, focus stacked by hand. This is the larva of the yellow-shouldered slug moth,
Lithacodes fascioloa.
Slug caterpillar by
Mark Sturtevant, on Flickr
Next up is a caterpillar that was found in tall weeds, clearly preparing to form a chrysalis. Spiney cats can be hard for me to ID, but I kept this one, and it emerged as a grey comma butterfly,
Polygonia progne. There are pictures of the adult later on.
Grey comma butterfly caterpillar by
Mark Sturtevant, on Flickr
Here is a big robber fly,
Asilinae something-or-other.
Robber fly by
Mark Sturtevant, on Flickr
I’ve been trying to grow my list of new damselfly pictures. This looks to be the blue-ringed dancer,
Argia sedula. I don’t think I’ve photographed it before.
Blue-ringed dancer damselfly by
Mark Sturtevant, on Flickr
This picture is a good example of my ever-more-involved workflow in post processing. I used to just crop, maybe de-noise, maybe un-sharp mask, maybe fiddle with the curves tool. Now I gotta make layers, and the background layer is aggressively de-noised while the subject layer is sharpened with one of the
many sharpening tools in the Gimp “G’Mic” extension package. Curves are applied to enhance light and shadows a tiny bit. Often a smidgeon up-tick with the chroma slider, and then the layers are painted together with a layer mask. More than half of my pictures are focus stacked by hand to boot (although not this one). This workflow slows things down! Does it make a difference? Well, I swear it does a little bit…
And then there is this beastie. While staking out my favorite spot for dragonhunter dragonflies (none would come near), I found this large cast skin of a really gnarly looking dragonfly nymph. It did not take long to get the probable ID of a final molt of the royal river cruiser dragonfly (
Macromia taeniolata), which is a common big dragon in the area. Those mini Godzilla plates on the back and the
horns coming out of the eyes give it away.
Royal river cruiser nymph by
Mark Sturtevant, on Flickr
The last thing a minnow sees!
Royal river cruiser nymph by
Mark Sturtevant, on Flickr
Thanks for looking!