Stag beetle photos

[HorsePunchKid]

I found this stag beetle (Lucanus cervus) outside at about 1AM; picked it up on a sheet of paper and took it back inside to get some photos. Poor guy (girl, actually, I think) is missing a leg but seemed to be able to get around fairly well. Photos with Fuji S2 Pro, Sigma 50mm and 150mm, and a Sigma ring flash. Definitely a winning combination!

Scale reference:

Lateral view:

Ventral view:

Portrait:

(Note the reflection of her leg in her eye!)

Comin' at ya:

(I liked that one enough to make a wallpaper.)

 

[RandysWay]

Ew.

 

[Absentee]

nice shots...weird subject

GJ!

 

[Rustedimpala]

Cool pics!! At least its not a roach! Nice!

 

[jayjaya29]

Wow, got really upclose there. Nice work. The lighting is very good.

 

[Tim_axe]

Nice job there, I just learned some new descriptions of views. Also, I'd probably not be able to think straight at 1AM to pick this sort of creature up & take pictures of it. And here I am posting at 1AM, haha...

I really need to do something about my own flash. Maybe some foamcore, hot glue, and tin foil will get my light where I need it. Anyways, keep it up. I suddenly have an urge to take close-up pictures of food items & fruits...

 

[ScubaSteve]

looks like a june bug to me

 

[HorsePunchKid]

looks like a june bug to me

It may look a bit like one in the photos, but you'd definitely recognize the difference if you were to come across one. They're much larger, quite a bit darker, have a larger thorax and head in relation to the abdomen, and perhaps most distinctively, they have a defensive posture that the go into when threatened (which I guess I haven't really captured here). The male has the "stags" and is much more recognizable.

 

[PS-RagE]

The pics are a little clinical to my eye but still very sharp captures. How did you get it to sit still?

PS - why isn't there any EXIF data?

 

[BillLeeLee]

Nice pics, I just saw a gigantic black beetle in my house for the first time ever two nights ago. It was caught in a spider's web and it the spider was trying to eat it. Pretty hard to do though since the beetle was about 20x its size.

And PS-RagE, it looks like he probably stripped the EXIF data out of the pictures during editing. And apparently, if a stag beetle encounters a large object moving around, it stands still.

 

[HorsePunchKid]

The pics are a little clinical to my eye but still very sharp captures. How did you get it to sit still?

PS - why isn't there any EXIF data?

They are rather clinical, aren't they? Hopefully that's just because it was about 2AM by the time I actually got around to taking photos, and at that point, I just wanted some quick, accurate shots.

The EXIF gets stripped out by Photoshop 7.0's astonishingly lame "Save for Web" sub-app. I could list dozens of things that are just simply wrong about how it operates (mangling filenames, nondeterministic defaults, etc.). Anyway, I started using "Save for Web" to cut down the size of my thumbnails in my old gallery, though I guess that's a moot point now; it's just part of my work flow, really. And poor though "Save for Web" may be, it's still significantly more useful for quality/size optimization than "Save As... -> JPEG".

Time to upgrade, perhaps, since my new gallery (Gallery2, that is) will actually pull out EXIF and display it on the photo page.

 

[HorsePunchKid]

And apparently, if a stag beetle encounters a large object moving around, it stands still.

Yup, exactly. That was the defensive posture I mentioned. It is actually quite intimidating, considering how small the beetle actually is.