Mating Leaf Hoppers-Insect Super Macro Photography

Just as the Winter doldrums peaked in mid February, Colorado’s Front Range got a warm reprieve with over a week of sunny days in the low 60’s. Each morning the rising sun heated a patch of leaf litter in front of my house and roused hundreds of Striped Leafhoppers. They burst into a frenzy of mating. When the sun passed and the ground fell back into shadow, they disappeared into the leaves. The Leafhoppers continued to emerge on warm days for the rest of Winter.

The challenge of  any side-facing macro shot was to align the lens parallel with the mating insects to maximize depth of field.  At my standard f-stop of f/8 with the 24mm, only a scant slice of each bug was in focus.  I shot a hand-held focus stack of 5 shots. This was exceedingly difficult because one bug pulled the other around. When they finally sat still for a few seconds I shot my series, but one bug was startled by the flash and repositioned her legs after each strobe. This necessitated manually blending (masking) the stacked images in the area around her legs.