When Evatt engineer Tim Leach goes to work he helps create megastructures. When he is at home he loses himself in the world of macrophotography, recording ephemeral beauty that is rarely noticed by most people as they go about their daily lives.
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The dead beetle pictured here was frozen solid during a -5 degree celsius Canberra frost.
This image, which looks for all the world like a beautiful jewelled brooch from Ancient Egypt or the 1920s, was created from about 130 different exposures all shot on a tripod mounted camera fitted with a focus rail early one morning.
"Temperature this cold is necessary to provide the amount of frost crystal growth shown here," Mr Leach said.
"It also needs to be very cold to ensure the crystals remain stable and do not melt during the 40 minutes required to take this many separate images."
A keen photographer since first acquiring an Olympus OM-1 decades ago, Mr Leach said he had taught himself the art of macro photography and developed his own techniques.
"It has taken me about three years to work out how to do this," he said.
"Imaging frost crystals at this scale and magnification involves a very narrow depth of field. The finished result requires a macro lens, focus rail, Vernier micrometer and image stacking program [Zerene Stacker].
"It [Zerene] is used by a lot of macrophotographers," he said. "It has the advantage of being very fast. Something like this would take forever in Photoshop."
Mr Leach said he was fascinated by the shortlived beauty that was created by the miniature frost crystals.
"It is an ephemeral phenomenon that is very rarely recorded," he said. "I want to capture that moment in time and share it with other people."
The images were shot on a Canon 50D digital SLR camera.
To enter The Canberra Times Winter photo competition send a maximum of three photos to photocomp@canberratimes.com.au as attached JPEG files. Include your name, address, phone number, photo title, a description of the photo and the date it was taken. Photos must be at least 150 kilobytes and should not carry a watermark.
