Last week I mentioned being inspired by this fascination post from Dragonfly Woman, who looked at the diversity of insects that had passed-on in various light fittings around her home. I thought I would try the same thing, as it gives an opportunity to get close to the wee beasties without them running away. Here’s the result:
What I learned: This was the first time that I had actually tried playing with the settings on the camera. In particular, I fiddled with setting the white balance relative to the card on which I was photographing the specimens. This was important because of the peculiar light levels and the fact that most of the light was coming from a little angle-poise lamp that made everything yellow. As with last week, I used my Raynox faux-macro and it performed pretty well. There were some specimens that really need magnification, though…
Katatrepsis 
Excellent finds! Glad you decided to go on your own dead bug hunt. 🙂
Great shots! Keep posting helpful tips and some shots with different settings so we know what they do!
Thanks guys – I was amazed by the diversity that I found! I thought it might make a nice little note to a biology teachers’ magazine as a resource. There are plenty of things you can do: make an insect collection (though some specimens are brittle), calculate diversity, map them onto a phylogenetic tree… Then there’s the discussion of synathropy, which most of these species exhibit.