Mosquito Larva and Cuvette

Photographing living insects can be a challenge. They move! When they're aquatic, it's even harder. Sometimes your best bet is to use some kind of container. I had some mosquito larvae to photograph. I didn't set out to find them, but after some rainstorms, I found that a bucket had been left in my yard, and was full of water. Looking a little closer, I saw that it was filled with active, wriggling mosquito larvae. I didn't really want to encourage mosquitos in my vicinity, but at the same time it seemed like a great opportunity for macro photography. I used a turkey baster to suck up several of the larvae and dumped them along with some of the water into a glass jar. Then I emptied the rest of the water out on my driveway so the rest of the larvae wouldn't have an opportunity to grow up into biting pests. At that point, I was ready to set up a photograph. Using a disposable plastic pipette, I sucked up a single larva from the jar, and deposited it into a small cuvette designed for holding liquids to be analyzed in a spectrophotometer. Spectrophotometer cuvettes have two flat sides that make ideal for photographic windows, and two ribbed sides for you to grasp with your fingers, and it can be capped with a waterproof lid. Disposable plastic cuvettes are cheap and easily obtainable from Amazon or other vendors. The fancy reusable quartz ones are overkill, and very expensive. With the larva in the cuvette, motion was limited to a centimeter or two up and down and less than that front-to-back or side-to-side. I wanted to have a clean background, and I wanted to elevate the cuvette above my table top to make aiming the camera easier. A sheet of colored paper, laid flat on the table and then curved up and supported in back made the background. I happened to have a rear lens cap handy, so I turned it upside down on top of the paper and placed the cuvette on top of the lens cap. To light the setup, I used two speedlights, both set on manual. The main light was to the left and a little behind the cuvette. It had a cheap grid attachment to keep the light from spilling directly into my lens. It just sat flat on the table. I put a second light to the right of the cuvette, and facing away from the camera. A bit of black tape on that light prevented it from directly hitting my lens. I used cheap wireless remotes to fire the flashes. The remotes mean that there are no extra cords to clutter the desktop, and because camera and flashes are so close, the distance capability of more expensive units isn't important. I used two different lenses for the actual photography: an Olympus 60mm macro and a Canon 65mm MP/E macro, both on an Olympus OM-D E-M1 mk 2 body. (A Metabones adapter coupled the Canon lens with the camera.) This combination let me go from less than 1x magnification all the way up to 5x with the Canon lens. I hand-held the camera to shoot. Because the larva moved about a lot, trying to work with a macro rail would have been just too slow. By bracing my hands on the tabletop, I could follow the motion and shoot when I was focused on a composition that I liked. Of course, there were a lot of unusable images, but that's the nature of working with live subjects that can't take direction.