No time like family time

Last week I did something I had not done in 17 years… A family holiday.

There was little room for intense nature photography, since I was under instructions to stay around.
For those that don’t know, family is important (click here), hence most of my images look like this:

However, from dusk till dawn there was time to sneak around the house (in the Costa Del Sol area, Southern Spain), in search of creepy crawlers.

Gecko / Muurgekko / Tarentola mauritanica

For a long time I’ve had the idea to try macro photography with a strong “night effect”. It is the first time I tried this, so feel free to comment below.

I started with Roly-poly species

 

During daytime I got some subjects from fishing in the pool…

Yet I think the better images were taken at night.

  Daddy longlegs

At day this is the best I could do with a nest of ants, but at night I got different opportunities using a dead cricket…

    You can see that the left three ants, are in defense position, ready to spray formic acid.

Thanks to a huge grasshopper (Egyptian locust / Egyptische sprinkhaan / Anacridium aegyptium) I experimented with getting a silhouette on a wall.

I also managed to catch a male Rhinoceros beetle (neushoornkever/Oryctes nasicornis)

I look forward to your opinion on these dark pics…
Ciao
Karl