My wife came into the house screaming this morning because she found a caterpillar in her garden. She's absolutely terrified of caterpillars, and she demanded I kill it. The only time I've lied to my wife is when I told her I'd killed a caterpillar, but instead (after photographing it, of course) I simply moved it to a neighbor's property. This is an eastern black swallowtail caterpillar, and I used a ring flash along with a Canon 50mm macro lens plus an extension tube for additional magnification. I used the flash on 'ambient mode' which means the background wasn't so underexposed that it became black. In other words, the exposure on the caterpillar as well as the background leaves was correct. However, the out of focus background wasn't as uniformly attractive as I wanted, so I added a foliage background from my photo library in post-processing to create the ideal and complimentary backdrop to the insect. I took this on manual exposure mode using ETTL on the flash to provide the correct exposure on the subject. My settings were 1/80, f/32, and 400 ISO.
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