Insect Photography: April Shots
Here are some of my interesting insect shots taken in April
Now that insects are back in abundance there are lots of interesting shots to share. Making a choice though has become harder. Here are some of my April insect shots.
Taking off
Action shots are always great but you need quite a bit of luck to get them. This beetle was crawling over a leaf and I was trying to photograph him. Then he decided he had enough and flew away. Just at the moment he spread his wings I managed to take this shot. And luckily the image is even in focus. You can nicely see the large container that contains the wings when folded up and the two shields that normally cover it.
A rare, common wasp
I photographed this chalcid wasp in my garden. I has nice yellow legs. I like the way how it looks over the edge of a leaf, as if it is considering jumping down. When I tried to identify it, using the Dutch site waarneming.nl, I was rather surprised. It is listed as a very common species. But when I looked at the observations there where just two in the Netherlands before 1018 and only since 2022 there are a reasonable number of observation. In total, there are less than 150 observations in the Netherlands over the past 10 years. So it seems that this is a common wasp that is hardly ever seen.
My favorite butterfly
The orange-tip is my favorite butterfly in the Netherlands. It is so elegant and the orange tips are so clear when these butterflies fly around or sit down. They only appear early in the season so I definitely wanted to get some good shots. But a problem is that during the day they hardly ever sit down. (And I am not the person to get up very early for photography.) So I followed orange-tip butterflies for some two hours before I finally managed to get some good shots of one sitting on a flower. Now I still need to photograph a female. They don’t have orange tips so they are harder to distinguish from other white butterflies.
A common, very rare bug
During our spider expedition we also found this bug. It looks actually very dark so it is difficult to spot. Only with the light from the flash do you see the nice orange accents. This bug is considered very rare in the Netherlands. But we already saw five of them and there are lots of observations reported. In Belgium it is rather common, and it seems to be moving up north quickly. So this very rare bug seems to become common.
Color in the night
People that read my articles know that I like to attract moths at night with a lamp and sheet. Some of these moths are very beautiful and colorful, even though few people will experience that. This Ruby tiger is one of those. Its body is bright red and the wings and hairs are orange brown. It was sitting on the sheet but I placed it back in some bushed and there I could take the best shot where the color nicely contrasts with the green stems and leaves.
The first dragonfly
Spring is always a time of firsts. The first insect you see, the first bee, the first butterfly, and also the first dragonfly. Dragonflies are considerably harder to spot than butterflies. They don’t have bright colors when they fly around and they don’t drink nectar from flowers, so it is unclear where to look for them. And this time of the year there are only very few dragonflies around. This one I saw because I noticed some shininess in the grass. It was the sun reflecting in the wings of the dragonfly. The insect had most likely just come out of the water as it could not yet fly. I did manage to get it to sit on a little stem, allowing for this shot, after which I placed it at a safe spot to let its wings harden.
Mark Overmars is a dedicated insect photographer who loves to share and regularly publishes about his work. You can visit his website at www.insectphotography.org. Download his free insect photography book at www.insectphotography.org/book.
