Midway through the 2011-2012 beetle photographing and mounting project

Here is a quick snapshot of a work in progress.  So far I have taken over 2000 photographs of the 32 odd beetles displayed below.  Using my Macro Rig, I try and take three sets of 21 odd photographs of each beetle, one on it's side, top and bottom.  I then use the wonderful CombineZP software to combine a stack of photos into one photograph.  See my Macro Rig project for some examples of this. 

The beetles below have been arranged by the night of collection and is just a temporary arrangement on an old bit of blue PE30 foam.  I am waiting on my order of 2m x 1m x 6mm sheet of PE30 white foam to arrive.I also have two native wasps and two bugs mounted as well.

I took my temporary beetle display box to the Perth Museum last weekend and had a go at trying to use the Discovery centres beetle collection to help identify some of the beetles.  I was grateful that one of the State Entomologists could spare me a bit of time to help identify the beetles and give me some tips in building up and preserving the collection.  Using this information, and to help me learn taxonomy, I used the FreeMind software to compile this chart of the beetles collected so far: