Swiftie The Moth

Description

This furry teddy bear of a moth is only 30mm long! The print is best at least 24″ long! You can go larger!

Swiftie spent almost a year underground as a grub, to appear above ground as a moth, for a lifespan of about a week. Just to bonk. Not eat – he/she has no mouth parts when they are ‘reborn’ as this magnificent furry flying thing. What a life…. You won’t see many shots quite like this out there. I’m really proud of this one. I went max macro for this one!

HOW WAS ‘SWIFTIE’ COMPOSED? This was an opportune moment. No moths were injured in the making of this! I was walking through the living room and, a couple of feet off the floor, I saw Swiftie resting and holding onto the edging bead, where two walls meet. Perfect! A beautiful furry moth, in profile, with a neutral background trailing into visual obscurity behind it…

HOW WAS ‘SWIFTIE’ PHOTGRAPHED? This isn’t one photo, it’s two sets of image focus stacks… 2 sets of 8 images. Left and right, west and east, never the twain shall meet. Except here. To get this amazing amount of detail I used a macro lens and a flash. And simply taped a piece of white paper around the flash (harsh light) to spread the light out and soften it. For this detail, I had to get really close to the moth. It wouldn’t fit in the frame as a whole. Which meant two final images – one of the front, one of the rear. Each of these final images was composed of 8 images at slightly different focus points (about 1 or 2mm). Then a lot of time was spent combining them seamlessly. I think it went quite well!