Welcome back to Tiny Tuesday, where we— wait, what day is it? They all run together. Minuscule Monday? No, it’s Sunday, so that makes it… hold on now…
Anyway, while you’re shouting out answers, we’ll plow ahead with two miniature subjects for today – one The Girlfriend pointed out to me, and one I had waiting in the wings that I decided to tackle after the first. I haven’t been doing enough macro work anyway.
The one thing that I can say is lacking at Walkabout Estates Plus, that we had in abundance at the original Walkabout Estates, is/are Chinese mantises (Tenodera sinensis) – it’s just not as ideal an environment for them, being more wetlands that fields here. It’s not far from their ideal environment, but we don’t have many regardless, and I think their niche is more taken up with spiders. They should have hatched over a month ago, but this makes the first we’ve seen, so I spent a couple of minutes documenting the event, for which our subject here was only mildly cooperative. I started with the Canon 18-135 and switched to the Sigma 180 macro, which is what produced all of the images I’m displaying here.
At one point I lost the mantis, as it leapt away while I shifted position, but soon found it again – they certainly can’t go far at this size (somewhere around 20mm in body length,) but they blend in well. This one’s worth a closer crop.
Perhaps about 2mm across the eyes? Pretty small, is what I’m saying.
Then there’s the thing I found on my shoulder, which I have no decent idea how it got there.
This is not quite the smallest snail I’ve seen, since I’ve photographed them hatching, but certainly the smallest I’ve handled and found ‘out and about.’ That’s one of my printed millimeter scales underneath, so, 2mm across. I used the reversed 28-105 for this, but perhaps should have also tried with the macro bellows; either way, depth-of-field was going to be abysmally short.
Another example of the scale:
Yes, that grapefruit-colored rug is actually my fingertip. Again, could have been sharper, and since I still have the shell, I may make another attempt later on, but I still have to finish the Tip Jar post for this week too, so not right now.
By the way, the thesaurus only yielded two choices for ‘S’ words that mean, “Tiny”: “Small” they also list “Smallish,” which is cheating,) and “Scrubby.” Sunday is not the day to do this…