Macro Contest Results for May 2024 - "Bugs"

Our May 2024 competition wrapped up two days ago and it was yet another record breaker, both in the quality of the submitted images and in the number of entrants. I was delighted to welcome my son, Joe Walls, into the studio to share the judging responsibilities for this month. We worked our way through over 100 entries and slowly negotiated compromises between our two top ten lists, until 24 hours later we had a final selection. In this video, Joe and I present our results and argue about our choices. This took way longer that usual and was much harder than this process typically is, but we are both happy with the final results and I don’t think we could have done a better job.

** Late Entry **
I spoke too soon - it turns out I could have done a better job. Towards the second half of the video, right after losing one of the 10th place ties, I also made a mistake - two mistakes actually - while describing Bill Wheeler's excellent photograph of Hymenopteran hamuli - I said they were on the leading edge of the forewing (wrong) and corrected my error by adding a graphic locating them on the trailing edfe of the forewing (also wrong). I am making one last correction and moving these little hooks to where they belong - on the leading edge of the hindwing. For completeness, I also slapped my forehead. Thanks to Bill Wheeler for keeping me honest!
***

This is a longer video than usual but between the Honorable Mentions and the images in the top ten, we had 40 images to talk about and that was only one third of the entries we had to choose from. I think getting it done in only 90 minutes was pretty fast work when you think that that’s only a little over 2 minutes per image.

We had better get moving.

Don’t forget to check out the newly revitalized Discord Server and my website for information about the coming week! https://www.allanwallsphotography.com