Some shots I was processing this morning.
First, from last fall, another attempt at deliberate camera blur. Most I didn’t care for but I think this one ended up looking a bit like a forest afire.
Then from a recent walk with the macro lens, a flower and a very small gnat looking somehow rather brave.
Finally—look away if you’re bothered by spiders—two shots of spiders in our basement, one of them working busily on preparing an isopod (aka pillbug, sowbug, woodlice) for a meal. Living insects or arachnids are really hard to shoot with a macro lens if you’re not using a tripod and even if you are, they’re really tough if you want to focus stack, because, well, they move. I’ve read up on it a bit and people who are serious about insect photography with cameras using macro lenses as opposed to microscopes have three basic tricks: spray sugar water on a plant, which a lot of insects will stop to feed on and remain immobile even if there’s a camera and a person quite near; capture an insect and put it in the freezer for a little while, which will not kill them but they will be extremely sluggish for a while and you can shoot them on a light table or in some other planned set up; or kill them but in a way that keeps them intact. I don’t see a lot of people advocating that last one, but I think it’s pretty well known that’s what some unethical photographers do. Some of those “wow that’s amazing and cool, look at that praying mantis waving or that frog holding a parasol mushroom” shots are from photographers who either kill the animal and then use light fishing line to hold the body in poses (the line gets removed in post-processing). Or worse yet do that to animals that are still alive where the line is threaded through their body.
Mostly I just shoot them as I find them and the results are usually not very good—though I have tried the sugar water strategy and it does work with some insects, mostly pollinators.