Back in the 80s, I wanted to photograph the periodic swarming of thousands of ladybugs -- I had seen pictures of it -- but had no idea how to find them. I was shooting lightning storms one summer near Flagstaff, Arizona, when I stopped to ask a local man in which directions storms came. As we were talking, his little boy came over to us and said, Dad, look what I found. In his small hands was a huge mound of ladybugs. I couldn't believe it. I asked him where he found the insects, and he showed me on the other side of several trees -- invisible from where we had been standing -- all of the trunks were covered in ladybugs! I shot this with a medium format camera and a 110mm lens (which is the 'normal' lens in the 6x7cm format), and that meant the depth of field was very shallow (medium and large format cameras have less dof than the 35mm format). Keep in mind that due to the curvature of the tree trunk, depth of field was an issue. Since I needed the image to be tack sharp edge to edge, I used f/32, a tripod, and because the insects were constantly moving, I used a flash to freeze them in place. I used Fujichrome Provia 100 transparency film (100 ISO), and the shutter was 1/125 to sync with the flash.
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