When insects are moving and you want depth of field so their small bodies are sharp throughout, the best way to photograph them is with a flash. And the best flash to use when the camera is very close to the subject is a ring flash. For this American dagger moth caterpillar I photographed yesterday here in Tennessee (I found it crawling on the bricks of my house), I used a 50mm lens, the Canon 5D Mark III, and a Canon ring flash. The background is a print of out of of focus foliage to prevent it from going black. I held the print about 7 inches behind the caterpillar, and I used manual exposure mode on the camera and ETTL on the flash. I could thus set my lens aperture to anything I wanted -- f/32 in this case -- and the exposure was perfect. The communication between camera and flash gave me the correct exposure at any aperture I chose. See the August issue of Photo Insights (it will be sent out August 1), my monthly free eMagazine, to read more about macro flash.
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