Plans for Summer 2010

I have my macro rig nearly how I want it. I've got the 430EX II on a cheap straight bracket, with an off-camera TTL cord and a DIY diffuser. I've got a replacement TTL cord coming in the mail (the current one damaged my Vivitar, leading to the 430EX II), and as soon as that comes, I'll put up some pictures of the whole thing.

I've already been out shooting, and have been pretty happy with the results. There are plenty of miner bees out and about, and I already met one of my goals for the year: shooting a miner bee, or a sweat bee, at the entrance to her nest. I've seen one or two metallic sweat bees, several carpenter bees, and one cuckoo bee. Hopefully it'll really warm up soon and more will start coming out.

Shooting a miner bee in the nest was one goal. I have a few others, in terms of subject matter and productivity.

• More bees in nests, on branches, mating and in other behaviors besides foraging.
• There's a mid-sized bluish-black bee I've seen a few times, but never have gotten close to.
• More wasps.  There are tons of them around, and I don't have much to show of them.
• Beetles, too.
• I want to re-do my series of ants farming aphids from last summer.  I feel like I got several great moments captured poorly.
• I'd like to rent the 180mm Macro and shoot Karner blue butterflies in the Albany Pine Bush.
• Same with a good wide-angle, for landscapes there.
• Build up my collection of rights-managed nature stock on Alamy.  I want to have at least 200 good images there by the end of the summer.  I've gotten 26 accepted in the last two weeks, so I'm on a good track for that.
• Put out a book of bee photos.  I'd like to focus on my favorites, the green metallic halictids, but I haven't decided how specific I want to get.  It would be a combination of images and text.

Lightroom keywords for taxa

I hate keywording.  I really do.  I like post-processing in general but sitting down and coming up with all the possible ways someone might be searching for an image is tedious.  Especially as a nature photographer, since there are so many different things about an animal that might be potentially interesting to someone.

Take the name of the animal, like this Andrena bee. Someone may need a photo to actually represent the genus Andrena. Or they might just be looking for any mining bee -- in that case, are they looking for the term "mining bee", or for the family Andrenidae? Or even the sub-family Andreninae? What if they're looking for any bee? Any hymenopteran? Any insect?

I hate having to put all those in, and honestly I often half-ass it and settle for "bee, andrena, insect". That's probably fine, especially if it's a photo I'm just putting up on Flickr, but I don't like leaving those other possibilities off the table just because I'm bored of typing in family and order names, and want to get to the next photo.

Lightroom has a way to automate this, through the creative use of nested keywords and synonyms.  A keyword can contain other keywords: Let's say you have a tree that looks like this:

food
        meat
        plant
                fruit
                vegetable
                grain
        dairy

The benefit of building this structure is that when you export an image with a keyword nested inside another, Lightroom walks up the keyword tree and adds every root keyword it finds.  So tagging a photo of an apple as "fruit" would also automatically tag it as "plant" and "food".  The tree is one-way: tagging it as "plant" does not add "fruit", "vegetable", or "grain".

Synonyms are related to trees.  Instead of an up-and-down structure, it's side-by-side.  So you could add the synonyms "veggie" and "greens" to "vegetable", and they would all be added to any image tagged with "vegetable".

 Essentially what I've started doing is to build a taxonomic tree of nested keywords, all starting under "animal".  Inside "animal" is the keyword "arthropod", which contains "hexapod", and then "insect", and "Hymenoptera".  I've started building a structure below this of all the kinds of bees I might conceivably find -- I've only got it flesh out to about the tribe level so far, and in some places not much below the family, but here's what the hymenopteran part of the tree looks like when I export it as a text file:

({brackets} show synonyms of the keyword they're inside, so "hymentopteran" is a synonym of "Hymenoptera".)


Hymenoptera      
    hymenopteran}                      
    Aculeata                              
        bee                  
            {anthophila}
            {apidae}
            {apiformes}
            {apoidea}
            Andrenidae
                {andrenid bee}
                {solitary bee}
                {burrowing bee}
                {ground-nesting bee}
                {miner bee}
                {mining bee}
                Andreninae
                    Andrena
            Apidae
                Apinae
                    Anthrophorini
                        {anthrophorine bee}
                    Apini
                        {honey bee}
                        Apis
                            Apis mellifera
                    Bombini
                                       {bumble bee}
                    Centridini
                    Emphorini
                    Eucerini
                        {long-horned bee}
                    Euglossini
                        {orchid bee}
                    Exomalopsini
                    Melectini
                Nomadinae
                    {cuckoo bee}
                Xylocopinae
                    {carpenter bee}
                    Ceratina
                        {small carpenter bee}
                        Calloceratina
                            Calloceratina cobaltina
                        Ceratinula
                            Ceratinula arizonensis
                            Ceratinula cockerelli
                        Zadontomerus
                            Zadontomerus calcarata
                            Zadontomerus dupla
                            Zadontomerus strenua
                    Xylocopa
                        Xylocopa virginica
                            {Eastern carpenter bee}
            Halictidae
                {halictid}
                {halictid bee}
                {sweat bee}
                Halictinae
                    Augochlorini
                        Augochlora
                        Augochlorella
                        Augochloropsis
                    Halictini
                        Agapostemon
                            {green metallic bee}
                            {green sweat bee}
                            {green}
                            {metallic}
                            Agapostemon virescens
                        Halictus
                        Lasioglossum
                        Mexalictus
                        Sphecodes


For myself, I've chosen to use Latin names as the base keywords, with common names and outdated scientific names as synonyms.  Where a common name can apply to more than one species, I put it as high up on the tree as I can.  In some cases, like for Agapostemon (a bright green bee with a reflective thorax), I added certain adjectives that will be relevant to any photo I ever take of one as synonyms.

So, I tag the image above as "Andrena".  When I export it, Lightroom automatically adds all the root keywords and synonyms it finds.  It ends up tagged as "Aculeata; Andrena; Andrenidae; Andreninae; Hexapoda; Hymenoptera; andrenid bee; animal; anthophila; apidae; apiformes; apoidea; arthropod; bee; burrowing bee; groundnesting bee; hexapod; hymenopteran; insect; miner bee; solitary bee;" -- all from one single tag.

I'm also fleshing out structures for other groups of animals that I frequently shoot, and will do the same for behaviors later.  All my spiders are auto-tagged "predator" now, for example.  It's an up-front investment in time, but great for days like today, where it's raining and I'm waiting on FedEx to bring me my replacement flash.  And I'll be perfectly honest: I love automating repetitive tasks, I love taxonomy and phylogeny, and I love directional trees (graph theory is my favorite kind of math).  It's a total confluence of geekery, that, for once, is actually somewhat productive.

Broken pictures

Many many many of the photos in my blog posts will be dead links for a little bit.  I'm reorganizing my galleries into a more logical, easy to browse structure.  For example, instead of one gallery of ALL bees and wasps, I'm just going to have a sub-gallery for all the hymenoptera, and then different galleries for each different type.  But it means breaking the links to almost everything I move around, so apologies for that.

Macro bracket, part 5 : flash resolved

As I mentioned before, I wasn't sure if I was going to keep on using a Vivitar 285HV as my light source or not. I wanted to upgrade to a TTL flash for better consistency and rear-curtain sync, but funds are limited. A couple things have led me to order a 430EX II this morning, though.

First, I found that the guide numbers of the Yongnuo flash I was considering was understated by about a stop. This isn't really a big deal to me, except for the fact that it meant I'd have to use a higher power setting than I really want to, which means a longer flash pulse. When I considered that along with the uneven build quality, lack of a real warranty, and the other minor uncertainties that come with buying a third-party flash, I decided that I wasn't confident in putting my money there. All the little uncertainties add up to too much of a risk -- the YN-465 is about $15-$20 out of my comfort zone. (I will definitely say that the YN-460 II is not, and if I were looking for a manual flash right now, it'd be at the top of my list.)

The other thing is that I've noticed the foot of my Vivitar is starting to crack apart.  My off-camera cord has a slightly wobbly hotshoe, and the back-and-forth movement has put enough torque on the foot to start peeling away one of the flanges.  I've shimmed the hotshoe so it won't move anymore, but now the flash moves on its own.  It'll be fine as a remote flash, laying on its side with a receiver on the foot, but I don't trust it mounted to anything where the cracked flange has to support its weight.

So, I bit the bullet and ordered the 430EX II from Beach Camera's eBay store, which had the lowest price of any Canon authorized dealers after cashback.  I wish I'd noticed the damage to the Vivitar last week, when there was a $15 rebate, but what can you do...

I considered replacing the off-camera cord, which is the old "Canon Off Camera Shoe Cord 2" that was replaced by the OC-E3, but I think I've fixed the wobble (kind of a rotating looseness in the metal part of the hotshoe) by shimming it with thick paper.

Once the new flash arrives, I'll make a diffuser that fits on it in the same style as the one I made for the Vivitar, and I think I'll have my bracket finished.  I'll post photos explaining everything then.  In the meantime, I'll finish going through all the photos I took last week while I was visiting family in upstate New York.  I've already uploaded a whole gallery of sawfly photos, which I'm quite happy with -- my first real macros at a magnification higher than 1:1.  More very soon, I hope.