It is safe to say that nocturnal animals, especially birds , will most likely experience some sort of temporary blindness from exposure to flash at night. But this is temporary, and lasting for perhaps 5-20 minutes before the photoreceptors are fully recharged.
With arthropods the common wisdom seems to be that they are so understudied (and the usual methods of studying them are pretty well fatal) the benefits of flash photography in getting good detail far outweigh the relatively small chance of harming the individual we’re photographing. With photography we can often get great detail without collecting an arthropod. I think we cause more risk to our subjects just by being close to them (while being a large, clumsy mammal) than we do by flashing them. One time I brushed a leaf and caused an insect to drop… right into a spider web. Then of course I had to rescue it, damaging the spider’s web.
It’s different with other animals, especially the “charismatic megafauna.” Owls are the canonical example of animals you shouldn’t flash, because they could fly into something while their night vision is impaired.
I do wonder about salticidae in particular, since they have those huge forward facing eyes.
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It seems like Topaz has improved their models for arthropods a lot lately. Their earlier models really made a hash of the textures on Hymenoptera (they resemble noise too much), but the more recent ones seem to do a much better job. I still have problems with the backgrounds on my macro though. Might just be JPG artifacts.
EDIT: Here’s a bee that I’m pretty sure I ran through Topaz. 1/2000, ISO 2000, no flash. Sorry for the lack of cropping - I’m trying to get better at that now.
I’ve pretty much done the same, but for different reasons - I “see” more pollinator diversity if I use a long lens and raise my shutter speed for highly active insects. I’d say I get photos I’m pleased with (after running them through Topaz) up to ISO 2000 (on a micro 4/3 sensor), and I agree, they’re definitely IDable up to 6400.
I very often prefer to shoot with the camera set on “fill flash” during the day as long as I can keep my ISO at 800 or below but I can get decent shots a bit up from there. I’d shoot at 6400 ISO only if it is the only option I have at that moment.
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Depends what I’m shooting for me. I’ve lately been going after pollinators with the 300mm, and there’s really no point to fill flash at those distances. With the macro lens I tend to keep the flash on if I can, even in full sun. But with really active subjects in full sun I have to turn on high speed sync, deal with motion blur, or stop down too much and start losing detail to diffraction. When I go up to 1/1600 or faster for bees in flight I don’t really see any benefit from the flash with high speed sync on (maybe if I had a more powerful flash I would).
I also find my flash (Godox) overheats around 90F while my camera is still happily shooting at 100F and above.
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