Whilst I do use focus stacking in some instances, I didn’t with the dead leaf mantis image. I shot it at f22 and accepted that the overall image quality would soften slightly from the diffraction associated with such a narrow aperture. I would have preferred to use f16 if possible, but this subject was just a little too deep.

It is always important to remember that your depth of field extends both in front and behind the point you focus on. Therefore I manually focus slightly past the front of the subject. Autofocus often picks the closest part of the subject, wasting all of the depth of field in front of your focus point. Apologies if you knew all of this already, I just thought it worth mentioning!

Lastly, if you were to look at the high res of the dead leaf mantis shot, the very back does fall slightly out of focus, it just doesn’t notice at the size it is reproduced here.

I hope this helps,

Alex

When backlighting a subject, I operate the flash units in Manual mode as I find the camera’s metering system can struggle to give consistent results with such a high contrast scenario. Whilst I will have an idea of the ballpark flash power I want to use in advance, it will vary based on the distance and angle of the flash guns from the subject and the translucency of the subject. The most important thing to consider is that everyone has there own taste when it comes to backlighting. Mine is usually to take the highlighted edges of the subject as bright as possible without blowing out detail. With the flash in manual mode, I can fine-tune the flash power until I achieve this.

As for how I stop the insects crawling away, I must confess that sometimes they do! However with slow, careful, movements one can often get the critter to stay where you put it for a short while. Another thing that can help is to get to know their habits. For example, if a species is active by day, you could try photographing it after dark.

I hope this helps,

Alex