Yellow dung flies mating

Go LARGE if you dare

I met up with a couple of friends from the camera club today, we took a meander round the south end of Derwentwater, ostensibly to shoot some "minimalist" type photos. The weather had gone pretty hazy so was actually pretty ideal for that. At our first stop (just inside the gate by the road on the way to Manesty woods) I noticed there were a few Yellow Dung Flies around, and spotted these two pairs mating on a small pile of poo.

I spent a couple of minutes gardening long grass strands around the poo (the things we do for a photo)! But I needed far more depth of field than my macro lens could give me that close to the subject, so a focus stack was going to be the only way. Carefully setting the camera as close as I could without getting them to move away (they kept moving around) I started by manually focusing in front of them, and holding the shutter down on continuous shooting, moved the focus through the subject until it was behind them. Tried quite a few times to give me some chance of getting what I needed. I ended up with about 70 photos all from the same spot, from which I managed to select 12 sharp pictures at different points of focus, which I put into Photoshop and created a focus-stack.

Pleased with the result!