The development of a garden tiger moth in 22 pictures

The last couple of weeks, I’ve been documenting the growth and development of the Garden tiger moth. Because I want to include the entire caterpillar stage and it’s impossible to accurately predict how long this will take, I have to take into account multiple scenarios. In this case, I planned a photo session every other day, just to be sure I had the photos I needed. If the caterpillar stage lasts for 6 weeks, as was the case with this species, I have a lot of photos and I only need 8 of them for the final series. I thought it was a shame not to use so many other ones, so I decided to turn them into an animation.

Scaled to proportion

Putting such an animation together takes some effort. I had to edit all the pictures (normally I only edit the 8 pictures that are in the final series). Secondly, I had to scale them to proportion so you can see how much the caterpillar has grown. That took a lot of calculating. Finally, I had to align all of them, so they are all in approximately the same spot and there are no big fluctuations in placement.

This resulted in the following animation