Moth

I really didn't believe that this was actually a moth, but a little research revealed that although the smallest butterflies are around 15mm wingspan, moths actually exist a lot smaller. I had this creature pegged as some kind of fly, so I have some re-shuffling of my collection to do today.

This is the third bug in my series of unblipped creatures. It is fairly common and I have photographed it before, but never with any success and inevitably it gets beaten to the blip spot by something more impressive.

These tiny moths are a nightmare to photograph, image after blurry image ends up in the bin. I really don't know why, but they seem to fool the focus of the lens. Out of some thirty shots, I was reasonably happy with this image, but still work to be done. At around 5mm in length, it is well into the macro range, with the associated depth of field (DOF) and camera shake problems.

I have found with such shots that it is better to shoot from further back to get more DOF and use the pixels to crop in close.

I don't have an ID on this moth yet, but will do some work later today.

Dave