Did you know that Praying Mantis eyses changed colour at night - I didn’t realise this until a couple of days ago. I photographed this Mantis at night on one of our potted fig plants, and the red eyes were very noticable.

How do you tell the difference between sawfly larvae and moth/butterfly larvae.

From what I’ve read, one way to tell the difference between sawfly larvae and moth larvae is to count the legs. Sawfly larvae have 9 or more pairs of legs - 3 pairs of true legs at the front and 6 or more pairs of stumpy legs (called prolegs) at the back. Butterfly and moth caterpillars never have more than eight pairs of legs (3 pairs of true legs plus up to five pairs of prolegs).

One of the challenges of close up work is the very limited depth of field (i.e. not much is in sharp focus). You can increase depth of field by stopping down the aperture to f11 or f16, but depending on how large your subject, you may only have a few millimeters in focus (less than a mm at high magnification).

One of the challenges when starting out with macro is to get a photo of the eye segments of a fly. There are a number of ways you can go about it - a dedicated macro lens like a Tamron SP 90mm 1:1 macro or Sigma 105mm EX DG macro (or the Canon / Nikon/ Pentax etc. equivalent) would be fantastic.

While out gardening, I lopped off a branch and noticed it had a Preying Mantis egg case attached. I cut off the twig with the egg case and popped it in a container to see if any baby Mantis would hatch out.

Since I don’t have a “real” macro lens yet I’ve been making do with the lenses I have for close up photos. For very small insects I’m using an old 50mm Pentax M f1.7 lens - it does a fine job for small subjects that are not easily frightened away , but with a working distance of only a few centimetres from the lens to the subject it is hopeless for skittish insects like butterflies. This is where I’ve found my Samsung Schneider 50-200mm zoom comes in handy. (This is the same lens as the Pentax DA 50-200mm).