New Photos, 9/3/10

The photos I've added to my gallery this week are from a trip to visit family in upstate New York. My parents get a lot of bees and butterflies in their yard, so it's usually a good opportunity to get something interesting while I'm there.


Swarms of bumblebees were crawling into these flowers before they opened each morning. The rustling sound and weird mouth-like movement of the bud was very much like something out of Little Shop of Horrors.


I always see these brassy sweat bees when I'm there.


This fritillary was a nice surprise. Very bold, really didn't mind having its picture taken.

New Photos

Sorry for the lack of posts lately -- been a hectic couple of weeks. Lots of work, lots of back and forth, and very little time to sit down to get through photos. But here's a few that I added to my gallery this week.

Long-horned bee

A male long-horned bee, possibly in the genus Melissodes, drinks nectar from a sunflower. The long-horned bees, or Eucerini, are a large tribe of solitary bees that dig nests; like most solitary bees the actual nesting habits varies from species to species, but none of them build the huge nests we associate with honey bees. And none of them have the same complex social structure with queens, workers, and drones. The Eucerini get their name from the extremely long antennae of the males: the word itself means "true horn".

I see large crowds of these bees on sunflowers near me, especially in mid to late summer. The males hang out and drink nectar, and wait for a chance to mate with females who stop by for a break in their constant pollen-gathering. They start early and work at it all day: I walked past some at about 8:30am this morning and there were several females with heavily-loaded pollen baskets. A few miner bees and tiny sweat bees as well.

I took this shot yesterday afternoon. It's at a 1:1 magnification ratio, so just the macro lens without any tubes. The flash, a Canon 430EX II, is mounted on a bracket I put together, and shot through a diffuser made out of an old yogurt cup and Rosco diffusion paper. Unfortunately, right after I finished with these bees and started walking to the next place I hoped to find bees, the off-camera cord I had the flash mounted on literally ripped off of its threaded mounting post, and bungeed down onto the street. No damage, I think, since the coil-cord slowed its fall, but it's making me seriously rethink the value of using the cord's hotshoe as a mount: obviously there's too much flex and stress with the flash's center of gravity so much higher than where it's secured.

The identification of this bee proves difficult. I got several clear shots of the wing venation, an important characteristic to select between the hundreds of species of bees in New England, and one or two showing the color and texture of the thorax very nicely. With this, I used the bee genera guide at discoverlife.org to narrow it down to a few species in several genera that don't really look like perfect fits -- different proportions and eye color, for example -- or one eleven species in the genus Melissodes, which I think this probably is. The guides at discoverlife.org are highly detailed keys that need more knowledge than I actually have, not to mentioned a mounted specimen and a microscope, to take full advantage of, but it's still extremely useful in drilling down with the right shots. Once I repair my rig, I plan to go back to these flowers at night to shoot them sleeping -- the males really don't seem to leave -- and hopefully get a few other details that will help confirm the ID.

Lucanus capreolus

Reddish-brown stag beetle
Lucanus capreolus

Here's a big little beast. This reddish-brown stag beetle is about an inch long, with a thick, deep red body and huge mandibles. They look like an over-grown, over-armored army ant, but in fact the jaws are not terribly powerful. (From what I hear -- I haven't been pinched by one personally.) The beetle doesn't need them to be: the adults feed on tree sap, and the females have little nubbins instead. Well, really the females have normally-proportioned mandibles for a beetle of their quite large size, but in comparison to the males', they look a bit dwarfish.

Given that these oversized mandibles are useless for foraging and impractical for defense, and that it's the males who lug them around, you can immediately guess what they're for: wrestling. They fight over breeding territory, and the biggest mandibles gets the ladies. After mating, the female lays her eggs in rotten wood, which feeds the larvae as they grow over the next few years.

I found this particular guy upside-down on the sidewalk, fairly early in the morning. They're crepuscular animals, meaning they come out at dawn and dusk, so he was probably wrapping up his morning activity. No idea how he got flipped over, but they're not very graceful fliers, and he may have just tired himself out. They seem to play dead when on their back, like many insects, but I wonder if that's a defensive response or if they just take a moment to gather their strength. At any rate, I brought him home and stuck him in a clean plastic cup, with some paper towels for cover, and gave him a few drops of sugar water later on.

To shoot him, I turned a small cardboard shipping box into a lightbox, by cutting away a few extra sides and flaps, taping white printer paper along the inside, and covering the top with Rosco 1/4 Tough diffusion paper. I put the 430EX II on a light stand directly overhead, and used the WhiBal to nail the color temperature down and get the exposure in the right ballpark. I took a few shots at 1:1 with the 100mm Macro, and made a series of four verticals to merge into a hi-res horizontal, but he moved around a bit as I was shooting and they don't have a consistent focal point. This is one of them.

Identification was simple. Any huge beetle with huge mandibles is probably one of the stag beetles (Lucanidae), and we only have a few in New England. Lucanus capreolus is dark red, with a lighter yellow thigh. I was pretty confidant after flipping through Marshall's guide, and then checked the key on bugguide.net to confirm it. There's another species, L. elaphus, with even larger mandibles, but the ones on this guy are only about as long as the pronotum (the head). It's not visible in this image, but he has fan-shaped clubs at the end of the antennae, the eyes are slightly divided by a little protrusion called a canthus, and the surface of the pronotum and the elytra (the wing covers) are pretty smooth. All these things say Lucanus, and rule out other related stag beetles.

Photos from this week

Some new photos from this week:

Scytodes thoracica

Spitting Spider
Scytodes thoracica

This handsome little spider is, literally, a spitting spider. Their silk glands are located next to the venom glands in their head (well, the cephalothorax), instead of the abdomen, like many more common spiders. They don't spin webs at all, preferring to stalk their prey at night. Once they've gotten close enough, about a centimeter or so, they spray a line of venomous liquid silk from their fangs, snaring the prey. And then they eat it.

This is the first spitting spider I've ever seen. I pulled out a bowl for some cereal, and lo and behold, there was a spider with these really neat markings in it. Nature is everywhere, even the cupboard. It's a very small spider: this photo was taken at 2:1. I used the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM lens on extension tubes, lit with a 430EX II. The flash was shot through a 43" umbrella mounted on a lightstand; ordinarily I would say that's an impractical setup for macro, but the spider wasn't going anywhere and I had the whole thing set up in the living room already, except for the lens. Post-shoot wrap-up consisted of tossing the spider outside and getting a new bowl for the cereal.

It was a pretty straightforward animal to ID. The distinctive markings would have made it easy if I had known about this species, but I didn't and so purposefully ignored them: the spider was small enough to be a juvenile of one of the more common kinds I see around the house, and color patterns are really variable in many spiders. Judging by the large cephalothorax (the front section, with the legs), I didn't expect it to be a weaver. The eyes jumped out at me though, definitely not a jumping spider. There are six: a pair of median eyes in the center, and a pair of lateral eyes high on each side of the median eyes, partially hidden in the dark bands. So I turned to BugGuide's guide to spider eye arrangements, got momentarily concerned because of the resemblance to the recluse spiders, and then found the species immediately when I checked the Scytodidae. There's only one genus and a few species, and as it turns out, the markings for S. thoracica actually do look pretty useful for identification.

New photos this week

Here are a few photos I've added to my image gallery this week.

Flowers

Some recent flower photographs:

Spring flowers

The appearance of small plants and flowers in the past two weeks has been a huge relief. I'm not much of an indoor photographer, and with the change of weather I've finally been able to get outside again. I've gotten a few good ant shots already, but with my macro rig in a transitional state (to put it nicely) I've been changing things up by shooting some flowers in natural light. I uploaded several to my gallery this morning.



















Prints of all these images are available through the links.

Portfolio

Smugmug added a new feature this week that it's calling Smart Galleries, essentially a way to place virtual copies of an image into more than one gallery. It's something like Flickr's sets and galleries in one.

Anyway, I've made a "best of" gallery as a portfolio for my nature photography, so when I point someone to my website, I can give them a single link that shows off what I'm most proud of.

Check it out here!

2:1 magnification

I picked up a set of super inexpensive Pro Optic Extension Tubes. They feel pretty cheap and I doubt they'll last for years and years, but they come with electrical connections at half the price of the Opteka, a third the price of the Kenko, and a hell of a lot cheaper than Canon's.  If I could afford the Kenko tubes, I'd probably have gone with them, since they'll last a lot longer, but as long as they keep the lens on the camera and pass through information to stop down the aperture, extension tubes don't need to be fancy.  There's no glass in them: they work by moving the lens farther from the sensor, so it projects a larger image.  It's a lot like a film or slide projector, where the farther it is from the wall, the larger the picture.  But dimmer too: you have a fixed amount of light making up the image, and the larger that image, the 'thinner' it's going to be.

We're covered in snow and slush here in Boston, so my macro expeditions have been limited to the far corners of the kitchen, where I found the exotic Chlorophytum comosum: the spider plant.  With the 100mm f/2.8 USM macro lens, the full set of tubes gives about 2:1 magnification.  At this point, you really need buckets of light in order to get an aperture with a reasonable depth of field: my flash was set to 1/4 power and was only a few inches away.  Unlike bugs, spider plants don't run away from the camera, so I used a tripod to make these a bit easier.

Floating foliage, reflections

Floating foliage, reflections
Originally uploaded by mehampson

Shot at a pretty high ISO, since I was using a circular polarizer and the light was fading. Digikam really does a great job of luminance noise reduction; with my noisier shots I'm exporting from there, with RAW noise reduction set to about 80-100, and then doing a selective Gaussian blur and unsharp mask in GiMP, both at a threshold of about 15-30, depending on the shot. The selective blur cleans up the last bits of noise in defocused areas, and the sharpness just tightens things up a bit.

Green metallic bee wings

Green metallic bee wings
Originally uploaded by mehampson

I'd stopped posting photos directly here for a while because I'd gotten a little lazy about considering them "real" posts, but hey, why not get some more pictures up here. I don't know how I missed this Agapostemon shot from this summer; lesson of the day, always remember to go back and look at what you got.

Best of the summer

Bug season is pretty much winding down here in the northeast, and I've been going through my work from the summer, taking stock of what I've gotten. This is the first year I've done this type of photography, and it's gratifying to see the improvement I've made.

I thought I'd post a handful of what I feel is my best work from the season. I've posted a couple of these here before, but these all reflect some aspect of how I've developed as a photographer this year. (This post was written for dgrin.com this morning, but I thought it would be worth posting here as well.)


This is really the first macro shot I was able to accurately previsualize and then produce; it's also my favorite image since going digital. On top of that, this shoot was the first time I learned about metallic bees, which I think are fantastically cool :)



An Asian ladybug on the fence in my front yard; like the green metallic bee, this was among the first images where I was capable of controlling the light in a way that gave me the image I was visualizing. This was taken on a pretty sunny day, not ten feet in front of the white-ish siding of my apartment.



A simple carpenter ant on some kind of flower. (Plant ID is a real weak spot for me -- I'd captioned one photo as an insect on 'some kind of flower', until my girlfriend pointed out that it was, in fact, a common rose.)

I don't think I'd have been able to get a shot with this degree of contrast, with the soft lighting of the buds, and with a hyperactive ant, earlier in the summer, without so much exposure and focus chimping I'd lost the shot. I've gotten good enough at those, particularly at focusing, that I can usually get the shot I want without having to do much of that at all; I find I take two or three shots out of habit, and all of them are technically fine.


I have very few good butterfly images. I definitely need to learn how to approach them, and then get an exposure that's not entirely blown out, since I was mostly seeing these cabbage whites this summer. This one is pretty standard as far as composition goes, but I do like the contrasting shapes of the animal and flower.



This greater angle-winged katydid was just fun to shoot. It was pretty mellow and climbed right onto my hand, so this is from one of the few times I got to shoot a single animal in different compositions over a somewhat extended period of time.



This photo was a real goal of mine all summer. I was on my way home from the park the last week in August when I spotted this tiny orchard spider at the base of a shrub, and I got exactly what I had tried for with any number of less colorful spiders, by laying down behind the web and shooting upwards.

Covered in bees

So, I hadn't really done anything interesting in about two weeks. I had to go out of town for a weekend, and on returning, I lent my roommate part of my macro rig for about a week. Then Boston started breaking all kinds of heat records... I know, it's no excuse. I hope you can forgive me, just this once at least. In penance, I offer up some new bee images.



One thing I really like is the effect you get when you shoot through the leaf or flower. Especially when you have something nice and neutral, like the grains of pollen on the back of the bee, to go and set your white balance to in post. The brilliant glowing effect is, I think, pretty striking.



This is a good example of where I think a TTL flash with low power settings would work better than my 1/16th-and-hope Vivitar. The flower still has detail, but not as much as I'd like. I could fix this in post, but I prefer chanting 'get it right in-camera' to justify a fancy upgrade I can't afford.



This is similar to a shot I took last month of a carpenter bee entering a hollyhock flower, but I absolutely love the eye peeking out from under that thick carpet of pollen. Worth mentioning is that this bee (an entirely black species I don't recognize) buzzed my face right after I took this photo. Not as mellow as most bees around here...

And, a tip I discovered on this photowalk: wear long pants when shooting bees, lest they be inclined to fly up your shorts and cause you much distress before they leave.