I, too, am going with insects in flight. Here is my favorite - a Black Tailed Bumble Bee:
While I unfortunately don’t have any photos of insects actually in flight, I did find Iridescent Leaf Cylinder Beetle while in flight (it was just an orange blur) and managed to catch it. I tried to let it go but it didn’t want to leave my hand for ages, so I eventually gently brushed it onto a tree.
I’ve managed to catch two insects in flight so far:
Systenus albimanus. Only 7 observed in North America which includes 1 in Canada. This one. Here’s the story…
A couple years back I found myself in a very deep, old woods on a Niagara Escarpment trail that’s about 10 minutes from a big shopping centre, where my wife would be shopping for a couple hours. An opportunity to go exploring, even though I only had my birding camera (Nikon P950) with me. And a clip-on Raynox macro lens.
After about an hour and a half of lots of good stuff, including quite a few lifers, I thought I better head back to the car when I spied an extra dense little hollow between some real big oaks, where everything seemed very quiet, and extra dim. That’s when I decided to crank up the ISO on the camera (which is a pretty low 3200) and hope for the best.
That’s about the time I spotted a little scrap of light on a little fly just hovering in the same spot, about 4 feet off the ground. I didn’t recognize it, so I thought I would just wait and try to get a shot when it landed.
A minute later, when the fly still hadn’t left this tiny little 2 cubic inch space it had kept itself in, I thought, better try a new plan. I switched to manual 4k video and started rolling to catch anything I could as I approached. That was about another minute. The fly still hadn’t moved from its hover space, but at least I had ‘something’ on chip. Then it zipped away into the gloom.
Back home, I loaded up the video into a video editor, and scrolled past all the lousy focus, jerky framing and pulled a few very grainy frames of the fly. This, believe it or not, was the best of them (processed for better detail).
So, not a great photo, but a great find. Here’s the observation:
https://www.inaturalist.ca/observations/225335412
When I returned to the mall after my shooting I was quite pumped, and my wife was tired but happy with her shopping quest.
As we passed through the rest of the mall on our way to the parking lot I spotted a few men staring at their phones, looking dead bored and I thought to myself maybe these guys had been passing time too, waiting for someone to finish their shopping.
If they only knew how much fun they had missed… right?