Slow approaching and taking care to not cast a shadow on the subject is key, indeed. But almost always, the moment I gently touch the flower/leaf to change the angle, the bug senses it and flies/ jumps…
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Yep, I do also wonder how people are able to take more than 10 handheld shots and mange to stack it seamlessly…
That’s very tricky. It’s easy to get 3 if the camera has a setting to take three pictures with a “focus bracket” with only one push of the button. For more than that, I lock the focus and then shoot in continuous mode while slowly moving the camera either towards or away from the subject to catch multiple focal planes. It does require a very steady hand and/or some sort of stabilization, and of course a stationary subject. For processing the images, it helps to have software that will auto-align the images for stacking since there usually is some slight variation in framing with camera shake due to hand-holding. It doesn’t always work and I usually end up deleting a lot when I try to play around with this.
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Which software do you use for it?
I have spent a lot of time shooting bees (just submitted a research paper documenting some of my finds to the Washington entomo society journal). If light is great outside, I try to shoot natural light, high shutter speed, and get action shots. In lower light I am forced into using the flash (My D7500 has a great in camera flash) and low shutter speeds and about f18 seems to be my sweet spot, sometimes up to f22.
All the various diffusers I tried just got in the way and were too big.
Indoors on dead or cold subjects I still have a lot to learn but always use the flash and f20 to f22.
Typically Photoshop (CS5 or CS6, depending on the computer I’m on). It’s a two-step process with step 1 loading all files into a stack (File > Scripts > Load files into stack) and step 2 selecting the layers in the stack and aligning and blending them (Edit > Auto-Align and Auto-Blend Layers). I’ve also used CombineZM, which is a free program and works pretty well, especially considering that it doesn’t cost anything. It automatically aligns and scales the images before stacking them. There is a bit of a learning curve and some options to play with but you can find a number of good tutorials online. Sometimes one program works better than the other on a certain set of images, and sometimes getting a good result requires being selective about which images to stack, so more layers does not always equal better results. There are always artifacts around the edges after stacking, so it’s a good idea to take the pictures with enough space around the subject to allow for cropping the final image.
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Thank you! I will consider byuing Ps eventually, I tried a free programm, but it was very unclear how to do that with quite unintuitive interface.
I use a Panasonic micro 4/3 with a macro lens. For flash photos, I generally use aperture of about 13. I use flash most of the time except in bright sunlight, which seems to interfere in the shutter timing and causes blurry photos. If I can set the manual focus to minimum distance, I can move the camera to focus, and then measure the size of the insect by pixel distance (for example, 306.6 pixels per mm with this lens and camera). My photos are not masterpieces, but it’s easy to take pictures this way.
For mid to larger insects in the day time, I usually use a Sony RX10 iv. At full (25x) zoom it has a minimum focus distance of around 2.5 feet, which means I can take decent photos 2.5 feet from the bees and butterflies.
One thing that’s pretty important for me is to use spot focusing whenever I use autofocus.
Whoa! That skipper photo is breathtaking!
There are a lot of good ideas here. Thanks for posting them! 
I have been photographing for years and never heard the word “stacking” before. What does it mean?
I hardly use the automatic setting because my camera doesn’t do a good job in guessing the right exposure. My gear is old and falling apart. First the release button fell off after dropping the camera and now I have to use a paperclip to take pictures and last weekend my little flash broke. Despite all of these hurdles I can still take pictures. I will have to adapt to the new limitation of not having a flash anymore until I buy a new camera. I am limited with one fixed lens that it’s incredibly frustrating to focus manually so because of that I always use the automatic focus. However, this same lens is my saving grace because it it the only one that I have and when everything is right it can take good macro photos.
I think the quality of the gear is very important. So buy the best gear that you can afford. However, it depends, as some folks have already mentioned here, on your goals and what makes you happy.
You said it! Last weekend I had an amazing experience with butterflies. There were feeding on two plants with yellow flowers of the same species and they forgot all about my shadow and me. For the first time I was able to take decent pictures of different species of butterflies in just one spot. Furthermore, there were other bugs that enjoyed those plants while a beetle was drunkenly “drowning” in another plant with white flowers. The peculiar thing was that the beetle would totally ignore the plants with yellow flowers and the butterflies would totally ignore the plant with white flowers.
It means you make multiple photos of one object at the same angle, but with different focal points, then you stack thosee photos, resulting in 1 image with greater dof than 1 photo, most of professional macro is done that way.
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Like melodi_96 said - it’s also used extensively in microscopy, where it is often referred to as Z-stacking. I think that’s because the stage with the slide is the XY plane, and the focus knob moving the stage up and down is the Z direction in XYZ spatial coordinates. Wikipedia also has an article on focus stacking with example pictures: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focus_stacking
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@fffffffff @annkatrinrose OK Thanks! Interesting process. It sounds like that you definitely have to focus the object manually.
If you photograph small objects you can’t use auto focus.
Well, I do it all the time but after a certain size my camera struggles to use the auto focus. I used to put my finger next to the subject to help the camera to see it, especially in low light, but now I can only do it if I use a tripod and the self timer because I need both hands to operate it.
As I remember from reading years ago with smaller matrixes dof is bigger while quality is worse, so it’s easier to use auto focus as you can’t see much difference if it’s focused 3mm further or closer. Plus from experience it’s hardly can focus anywhere near needed point in many situations.
To represent this I take similary-positioned hoverflies, in 1 somehow both abdomen and legs are in focus (also shot with zoom, so dof is even bigger), in 2 it’s far from that, that is also why stacking is so valued in macro.
I’ve found that bugs will often move their legs or antennae within the several seconds it takes to get shots (since some flash charge time is needed), which screws up the stack.
I also use CombineZP (the original website is no longer up but you can download it from the archive on the Wayback Machine). It’s better for larger stacks with narrower depth of field, like microscope imaging, but as noted it tends to leave artifacts. It’s not too hard to use; there are a number of different algorithms, but usually either “Do Stack” or “Do Soft Stack” is what works. Photoshop works better where you have fewer images in the stack and want to keep the soft background, because it takes whole chunks of each image.
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Yes, you’re right, restless arthropods can be a real problem when focus stacking. I’ve found by far the best (and sometimes the only) way is to use a combination of Photoshop and Zerene Stacker which has excellent retouching tools, so you can select and copy the “best” leg and antenna shots to get an acceptable final result. You just have to be careful not to finish with a seven-legged insect with three antennas 
! It does take time and concentration, but I actually enjoy that bit almost as much as taking the original photo, for me it’s a sort of meditation. Yeh, strange, I know 
!!
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