{"id":39030,"date":"2021-09-08T09:00:20","date_gmt":"2021-09-08T16:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/?p=39030"},"modified":"2021-08-31T14:22:13","modified_gmt":"2021-08-31T21:22:13","slug":"whats-in-my-insect-photography-bag-mark-w-moffett","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/whats-in-my-insect-photography-bag-mark-w-moffett\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s in my insect photography bag? \u2014 Mark W. Moffett"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sign up here<\/a>\u00a0to get\u00a0What\u2019s in my bag?\u00a0a week early in your inbox.<\/em><\/p>\n

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I am a tropical biologist and explorer known for my studies of animal social life, and especially the behavior of ants, and I\u2019m acclaimed as well as an insect photographer. Because I often work in remote places, I need to cram any and all tools I might need into a bag that I keep on my back day after day.<\/em><\/p>\n

Pictured are the small items that I carry to watch ants and other insects \u2014tools I describe below starting at the left and proceeding clockwise:<\/p>\n

1. A small mirror to follow ants moving under objects within the leaf litter \u2014 surprising how often this helps. I have tracked ants many yards over periods of hours with this mirror, an insane job.<\/p>\n

2. A vial of sugar water dyed red to keep track of which ants are which (the ones that turn cherry red belong to my colony, hooray!).<\/p>\n

3. One of the vials of 70-80% ethyl alcohol I carry for preserving insect specimens.<\/p>\n

4.\u00a0A vial of dilute honey and a vial cooking oil, used as baits to assess what tasty diet my ants prefer and then to follow the ant workers back to their nest.<\/p>\n

5. 20X loupe (magnifier) on a silver chain that I wear around my neck when I need it often.<\/p>\n

6. Face mask made from blue cords and the sleeve of an old yellow t-shirt that I should perhaps replace with a mask against Covid \u2014 this I put on to avoid disturbing insects (breathing on certain kinds of ants can make them very angry!).<\/p>\n

7. Strong twine that can be employed, for example, to tie back any vines that get in the way of my access to a study subject so that I don\u2019t need to cut down any annoying plants.<\/p>\n

8. Orange flagging tape to mark the location of an ant nest or some other study subject.<\/p>\n

9. Sometimes I see something big! This is a small monoscope with a carabiner to attach it to one flank of the camera bag, which I use to quickly identify a distant subject like a bird before I pull out the 100-400 mm lens from my bag should I decide to study it further, or to take its picture.<\/p>\n

10. A featherweight forceps, which allows me to pick up an insect without hurting it (though I\u2019m fearless about using my fingers \u2014 ouch!).<\/p>\n

11. A black-stoppered aspirator, used to suck bugs into a small plastic container to examine later.<\/p>\n

12. A Swiss army knife with all the fixin\u2019s (though I\u2019ve grown cautious about bringing one on trips because before arriving at the airport I often forget to move it over from my camera bag into a check-in bag, and so airport security officials have looked at me crossly and confiscated several).<\/p>\n

13. A cheap compass because the one in a phone or GPS can fail in dense forests ( #$%!!! Where am I???).<\/p>\n

14. Extension arms that I adjust to position one or two camera flashes exactly where I want them to give my small subjects the best beauty treatment. (Notice the red tape I\u2019ve put around one arm, which makes this device harder to miss should I put it down in the leaf litter \u2014 I stick a bit of this bright colored tape to every small item of camera gear I own, such as my lens caps.) This is the only piece of actual camera gear from my bag that I show here. But, FYI: For insect photography I carry a 60 mm Canon macro lens, a 1-5X Canon macro lens, three 25 mm extension tubes and a Canon macro twin light (ring lights flatten the subject and should be avoided unless you\u2019re photographing postage stamps).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What\u2019s in my \u2026 ? issue #118<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[2303],"tags":[1553],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39030"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=39030"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39030\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39042,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/39030\/revisions\/39042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=39030"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=39030"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kk.org\/cooltools\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=39030"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}