Getting up close with Bugs!

Posted by admin on Jun 17, 2010 in Permaculture | 0 comments

Working on the Permaculture Soils DVD means shooting a lot of “B” stuff when the main photography is completed. Whats “B” roll footage? Well its all the overlay material to support Geoff Lawton’s narration. For me its the fun stuff we go and find and shoot. We can’t just have a talking head for most of it. The odd thing is that when you go looking for the type of small insects and soil creatures you need – then chances are they won’t be there when you go looking for them. Until today. A slightly overcast day with an late night shower meant the soil was damp this morning. Jane went out to plant something in the garden. She came back telling me to bring my camera. ‘There’s a mass of soil creatures under that mulch!” she said. I went out to have a look. Sure enough as she lifted the mulch a bunch of assorted creatures sprang to life. Ants, inch worms, slaters, spiders, mites and a grey predator gecko were all sitting in a spot about 12 inches square.

I ran to get my gear. Normally you wouldn’t bat a eye if you saw this in your garden, but in this case we needed to have these shots of bugs and have them as big close-ups in all their High Definition glory!

Now the hard part is dragging out all the lenses, camera, tripod and setting up to see that the creatures have all made a hasty retreat! Especially if they’re reasonably big. That’s true if your part of a big production team and travel with lots of gear. We’ve managed to reduce our gear to a small shoulder bag. For all the “B” footage we’ve managed to shoot all out small insect stuff macro-photography with a Canon 7D stills camera that also shoots HD video clips. Bolting onto the front of the camera a Canon 100mm Macro lens and some extension tubes means you can even shoot the head of a match-stick and fill the screen with it. But the trade off is depth of field or lack of it. Shallow depth of field means the fast bugs are hard to capture as they scamper about – usually out of focus. The good part is that your micro “actors” are never ending and always surprise you with some of their antics. In a healthy eco-system the diversity and quantity of life is quite extraordinary. One of the segments we needed to shoot has to do with earthworms. We have a large bathtub worm farm thats now about a year old and seems to have attracted a lot of supporting creatures into its world. There’s a certain scale we get used to looking at things like compost worms but when you magnify their world and see them on computer in the edit room you certainly begin to marvel as how much tiny life can live in abundance without us being remotely aware.