A mix of neat little things

Whoops! I went a week without posting anything. Work got pretty busy for a few days, and though I've been uploading them to my gallery and to Flickr, I haven't been writing about them.

I've added a new gallery for ladybug photos. I'm also including ladybug larvae, which are pretty neat looking. You can distinguish them from caterpillars and worms by their three legs. Around Boston I've been seeing a lot of Eastern ladybugs, which have a striking 'W' shape on their protonotum (the head-ish region), and even more of their larvae, which have forked spines.

I also built a diffuser out of the packaging that some prints arrived in. It's improved the highlights on the insects I shoot by quite a bit. I wasn't happy with the way the bare flash would completely blow out the specular highlights in a bee eye or ant leg, and with the diffuser in place I'm getting back a lot of that lost detail.

The prints that provided material for the diffuser were some test shots I ordered from Bay Photo, the lab that I now have producing my prints. I could not have been happier with the packaging: they were shipped flat, sleeved, and shrink-wrapped around cardboard. Each print is also color-corrected by hand, and printed on high-quality Kodak archival paper.

I specifically wanted to try the Kodak Endura Metallic Paper option through Bay Photo -- it's an amazing, beautiful paper, though there are some images it may not work as well for. I'm still thinking about that. In general, though, I highly recommend using either the metallic or lustre options for any of my prints, which [sales mode=on] you can easily purchase through my gallery -- I decided to lower the price on those options to match the less-expensive glossy paper, because a customer who automatically orders the cheapest paper type would be seriously missing out. So, in short, buy my prints and they'll look good.