Thanks. Before moving a few years back my studio was in a bare garage, yes. My chemicals would freeze in the winter and be uncomfortably hot in the summer! Now I have an attached garage with actual insulation, it feels pretentious. Focusing is just about the biggest challenge, taking upwards of an hour at times. With an eight-foot rail it takes a few moments of walking just to check and see the effect of any changes. Rinse, lather, and repeat a hundred times and your whole day is gone. I tend to use a good deal of movements to get the focus how I want it. The size of the subjects and objects in frame adds to the difficulty as it is easy to knock things over without even touching them, just from air movement alone. Sometimes moving the lights will cause a slight thermal updraft or sidedraft that disturbs the lighter subjects. It's amusing to watch dead insects take flight while trying to focus.
Exposures tend to be 30-60 seconds, depending on the magnification involved. There's a lot of light but the bellows extension factor is a killer. I use a combination of tungsten for modeling, halide for overall illumination, and LED for details. I have accidentally immolated subjects with hot lights which is why I started using the halide and LED light sources. I don't want to make my mark in photographic history being known as the one who set himself ablaze and dying while waiting for that one last exposure to finish (which is probably what I'd end up doing!)
I've experimented with flash but it's almost impossible to accurately meter in such a small space. Figure that moth is about half an inch tall and there's not a lot of working space. You can see it relative to the size of the lens which is of a standard size. I chose that particular subject for the behind-the-scenes shots because it was so large, most aren't even half the size. I do a lot of work with tweezers and 3x reading glasses.
