When I bought my macro lens way back when, I mainly bought it to take pictures of newts and frogs and turtles. This summer I’ve been having a lot of fun taking insect pictures and I wondered why I had never tried that before. The other day I stumbled across some pictures I had taken three summers ago when we first moved into the house and discovered that I had taken insect pictures before, of some of the same insects I’m photographing now.

I was at first surprised to realize I had taken them, I had forgotten about it.

I was then surprised to realize that they were terrible.

I don’t mean that in a falsely humble way, or to say that the pictures didn’t have the same quality of the work of the photographers who inspire me, men like Nick Nichols and Frans Lanting.

No, they were terrible even by my standards, and especially compared to the pictures I’ve been taking this summer. I’ve progressed as a photographer in the 12 years I’ve been taking pictures, but I was a better photographer 3 years ago than those macro pictures would indicate. They really look like I just pointed the camera at a bug and was happy with whatever I got.

This year I’ve definitely taken a different approach. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but after looking at my images over a few weeks it was clear I was paying much more attention to poses and backgrounds and colors and shapes. I’ve been shooting handheld, which makes it much easier to get the composition you want when your subjects are moving, although shooting handheld has a pretty low success rate in the macro realm. Nevertheless, it’s a lot of fun and even when my tripod is fixed I plan on shooting both ways.

This katydid is a good example of the change the last few years have brought, at least to my insect photos. I had never seen a katydid in Oregon before but found this beautiful specimen eating a rose petal on a spent blossom. After I took some pictures from the side, I moved around front and realized that, since the petal was nearly vertical, I could split the katydid with the petal and have its two eyes on either side.

It’s not a good picture for identification purposes, or even for study of the lifestyle of the katydid as you can’t tell it’s eating the petal. I took other pictures that were better for those types of things, but this was the one that my heart wanted to take. Thankfully my skills as a photographer were better up to the challenge to translate between what what the subject inspires in my thoughts and the image that ends up in the camera.