My apologies to the squeamish out there this week. Aila and I found this guy in her bathroom this week as we were getting ready for her bath. Normally if I was home alone I would run out of the house and drive as far away as possible, but since Aila was there, I calmly found a glass and captured him. By the way, these things move extremely fast.

After we examined the bug (which turned out to be a house centipede), had our bath and went to bed, I went back with my camera and my new macro lens to take a few photos. I'm not sure how anyone gets a head-on macro photo of these guys... they are so fast and this guy rarely ever stopped moving. However, I'm pretty happy with this photo.

Technical details: This photo was taken with my 5D Mark II + EF 100mm Macro at ISO 3200, f/16 for 1/30th of a second (with Speedlite 430EX flash at +2 flash exposure compensation).

Comments

I had a ton of them living in the basement in my old house in Sandy Hill.
Thought they were silverfish at first, but these eat silverfish.  They *are*
fast, which is pretty freaky, but they're supposed to be quite good pest
hunters..!

Yikes! We find these critters in the house periodically, and they scare the
bejeebers out of me. I think it's partly because they move so FAST, and because
the WAY they move (with all those legs) seems, well, extremely creepy - more so
than any other bug I have encountered. Yet I know they're not dangerous --
maybe it's some ancestral terror hardwired by evolution...  Thanks (I suppose!)
for finally letting me see what they look like up close and un-stepped-on.