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This weekend I had a bit of time in the morning before I had to head into lab, so I hopped over to the dragonfly pond at North Point Park. I wanted to try double-lens reverse macro shots with the setup (as you recall, a Canon 100/2.8 macro with with an inverted nifty fifty mounted in reverse) in the field, without benefit of tripod or controlled indoor conditions. It was a windy day, so i squatted in the mud at the edge of the pond for about an hour without getting anything worthwhile. Then I spotted a pair of these insects (I don't even know what they are - some kind of fly? - submitted to BugGuide) doing the dirty, and they were extraordinarily cooperative. This also happened to be underneath the little foot bridge, so it was fairly well sheltered from the wind.
I started with the 100/2.8 alone, on the principle that if they flew away I'd at least have a couple documentary shots at 1:1. Once that worked, I went for the double-lens shots. Depth of field, as usual, was a huge problem; individual frames at something like f/11 had maybe a couple hundred microns of depth, and I was only able to get one or the other partner in any given stack. This is where the 40D high-speed burst mode really came in handy. Fortunately they were remaining so utterly still that a second burst on the other partner showed no significant variation, so I was able to superimpose the two stacks in photoshop and generate the image above. The transition point between the images is roughly a diagonal line between the two bodies; you can barely see it. In fact, the foreleg in the foreground is itself a composite; the distal part of the leg is from the bottom stack, and the proximal part from the top.
I am really, really glad this worked out. I had been extremely frustrated all morning and decided to just sit on this ledge under the bridge to stretch my legs when I spotted these guys. Actually to be fair, I had spotted a damselfly first; this was too far away, but my eye was drawn to one of these large mosquito-like craneflies, which I photographed with the 100/2.8 alone (but it appeared uninteresting on review of the images).
