On this date 23

Al Denelsbeck

time exposure of driving down city street
Back from 2005, we have an experimental image that showed proof of concept (which wasn’t really necessary – I knew the concept was solid,) but needed work on the execution. This is a mere one-second exposure while driving down a city street, intentionally streaking the various lights. One second seems to be a pretty good amount of time for this – I wouldn’t go longer than two – but from the wiggly lines it’s clear that either a smoother road (good luck with that in NC) or a stabilizing float mount is required to get a decent picture. And of course, mounting the camera with a clearer view, or at least using a more exotic car than an old Mazda pickup. I’d stood the tripod in the center of the cab within easy reach, but I recall that this is easier to imagine than it is to set up; cars aren’t typically made with lots of places for the tripod feet to go. Another way that photographers are discriminated against…

In the back of my mind, I was always going to retry this, but here it’s been fifteen years now…

Then, for reasons best left unvoiced, I went for five years without once taking a (keepable) photo on June 3rd, so we pick up again in 2010.

female wolf spider genus Lycosidae with offpsring on back
On my doorstep, a wolf spider of undetermined species, but genus Lycosidae anyway, was parading around with her voluminous offspring on her back, as they do. It might be easy to believe that this is an especially high-magnification shot, but no – wolf spiders can get pretty damn big. I know the size of the beetle she’s chowing on so she’s an estimated 25-30mm in body length. The deep shadows of this photo finally convinced me to finish a project I’d been intending to tackle, which was a dedicated macro softbox for the flash unit. It actually worked pretty well (note that the photo there was posted just a few weeks later,) but I also recognized the value of indirect, off-axis lighting and have been refining the designs ever since.

[It’s funny – while this post topic was just intended to provide regular content even if the week was slow, the posts have become a lot more about trivia, conditions, and progress, and they’re often served by showing earlier entries for comparison.]

The image above came from the Arthropods 1 folder, by the way. Our next entry from 2013 came from the Arthropods 3 folder. I’ve said before but you probably weren’t paying attention, I split the stock images up to make them easier to go through and get to about 4000 images before I jump to another folder, so I was fairly busy with the bugs those years. I’m about halfway through Arthropods 6 right now…

juvenile green lynx spider Peucetia viridans with morning dew attached
This green lynx spider (Peucetia viridans) wasn’t very big at all, but I can’t remember exactly how big, so you’ll just have to guess by the droplets of dew adhering to its body, and the translucence of the exoskeleton; I’m pretty sure it’s on budding hydrangea leaves, so I’m guessing within the 15mm range. If you look closely at the drop on the head (right behind that Lurch hairpiece that cradles the eyes,) you can tell that I used the second softbox design for this, because the highlighted reflections there are rectangular. And then, position is still a factor; notice how deep the shadows get on the left side of the photo? That tells us the flash was positioned on the right. Eventually, I found a way to move the flash rig easily from one side to the other, depending on my subject. I don’t do it as often as I should, but it’s a lot easier now than completely dismantling the flash bracket to reverse it.

And now we have 2015.

cherry tomato blossoms and emerging tomatoes
This was from the second attempt to create a garden at the new place, which we eventually gave up on because of both the soil not being optimal, and the only place that gets enough light is the front yard. But as we were learning this lesson, we have this cherry tomato plant that was transitioning between flowers and fruit, showing the various stages in one photo. In comparison, we have some (potted) tomato plants right now that are just starting to bud out, but we’re admittedly running late in planting this year. The old place was pretty ratty overall, but damn did it have good soil – stuff was effortless to grow there. Ah well.

Just because, part 36

Al Denelsbeck

Given the topic of the previous post, I feel obligated to get a start on this month with an image that embodies incredible depth, poignancy, and insight.

Don’t believe me? Check out the nails on girlfriend here.

basking yellow-bellied slider Trachemys scripta scripta showing inordinately long toenails on foreleg
You just know she’s going to start complaining loudly that the price that came up at the register was way higher than it said on the shelf…

Blog trivia is the worst kind

Al Denelsbeck

So I noticed something the other day as I was checking my records. A year ago, I set a significant personal record (the ‘who-cares?’ kind of record) in May with the number of photos uploaded during the month, that number being 173; this was due to the trip we took to South Carolina, and I can’t even give the town usefully because we were between two and not even the residents seemed to know whether it counted more as Pawley’s Island or Murrell’s Inlet. Regardless, that was a notable jump, since the previous record had been 103 images in a single month. This also helped set the stage for the year being a record-holder as well.

May of this year is not even in contention – I uploaded 89 images for the month. However… the total for this year, so far, is well in advance of the same time last year, even with those 173 images from one month alone: 312 uploads by the end of May last year, versus 355 this year. The previous months held their own quite well, which says a lot considering those are the slow months of the year.

Will this trend continue? Will 2020 be a banner year for photos uploaded? Does anyone actually give a flying fuck? We’ll find out… well, it’ll be a few months yet. Except for maybe that last question.

Yeah, whatever

Al Denelsbeck

You might have known, had you bothered to look at your calendar or the side of your frozen pizza, that today is another holiday, being Lack of Ambition Day, which pretty much explains why I didn’t tell you sooner. I’d go into the history of it, and the ways that it’s celebrated across the globe, but that would require way more research than I feel like putting into it right now. If you want to spit in the face of its founders and look it up yourself, feel free – I’m not that disrespectful, myself.

Hopefully the batteries in your remote are in good shape, because you aren’t likely to go changing them now. The clothes can stay in the dryer overnight. The flat tire is not gonna get any flatter, so forget about it. If you have any adult undergarments handy, have at it – they’re not as bad as they seem.

That’s enough typing.

There’s something about May

Al Denelsbeck

What was it now? Oh, yeah: it’s over. And in recognition of this, we have the month-end abstract.

six-spotted fishing spider Dolomedes triton showing surface tension from middle of pond
Up early one morning exploring Our Hosts’ pond during our trip earlier this month, I took advantage of the morning twilight showing the water bowing under the trivial weight of the spider. And that’s all I’m gonna say because I apparently can’t type seven words in a row without a typo…

Some quick closeups

Al Denelsbeck

Last night I did another check at the nearby pond, not just seeing how active the treefrogs were, but also looking for other, aquatic subjects. They weren’t hard to find, but my first surprised me a little.

newly-hatched painted turtle Chrysemys picta at water's surface
This is a juvenile painted turtle (Chrysemys picta,) and unless I miss my guess, it’s this year’s brood, judging from the lack of ridges on the scutes (shell ‘scales.’) I found it in the same little drainage puddle as the snakes from the previous post and video, quite possibly swept there during the overflow flooding that followed the torrential rains we’ve received the past few days. The puddle didn’t have enough vegetation to make it happy, which it could correct for itself easily, but recently, the HOA around the nearby pond elected to poison all the weeds along the edges, and I’ve already found a few dead turtles on the banks – turtles eat pond vegetation, so there’s little doubt as to what killed them, and I don’t feel it’s prudent to reintroduce my little model here into that. Right at the moment, it resides in my backyard pond liner until I determine where to take it. Relocating turtles also isn’t a good idea, since they have immunities and diets based on where they’re presently living, but right now, it’s kind of that or take the chance on it being directly poisoned.

Also, quite curiously, this is the only painted turtle that I’ve seen anywhere near that pond, in six years – I’ve only found sliders, snappers, and musk turtles. So did it get swept in from some location upstream, one of the feeders into the pond, and then swept back out again? I couldn’t say, and so far, neither has it.

I’d seen some activity earlier from my next subject, so it was a target on last night’s exploration, which was more successful than I’d first imagined.

giant water bug Belostoma flumineum with backswimmer genus Notonecta prey
The guy on top is a giant water bug (Belostoma flumineum,) my target, and its capture is a backswimmer (genus Notonecta, possibly Notonecta kirbyi.) I had scooped up the giant water bug into a jar, and collected a few other odds and ends like tiny tadpoles and some of the backswimmers. Before I’d even left the edge of the puddle, the water bug had snagged a backswimmer for a snack, and retained it despite the sloshing around until I attempted to transfer it into the macro aquarium (where both of these photos were taken.) Sorry that I missed that shot, I introduced another backswimmer, and within minutes the water bug had begun another meal. Pig.

But I’m not complaining. Having something in captivity, especially short term, demonstrate feeding behavior is rare and often hard to accomplish, so being as cooperative as this helps a lot. Not from the backswimmers’ point of view, I’m sure, but they can write their own posts. The biggest difficulty that I had was from the turtle, which was sharing the macro aquarium for a little while, because it tended to blunder into the feeding water bug just as I was pinning down focus.

The turtle, by the way, was roughly 50mm in carapace length, while the water bug was a measured 25mm in body length, 5mm across the width of the eyes; I just now noticed that the dark coloration to the upper eyes wasn’t just a lack of reflection, but appears to be some kind of material, don’t ask me what. I feel obligated to point out that both of these arthropods don’t appear to have any of this coloration when seen ‘normally,’ merely looking dark brown under casual observation – it takes the flash and the right angles to show these hues. Still debating about whether I’m going to make any attempt to do aquarium video or not – there are a lot of challenges to surmount. Sure as hell, it’s gonna wait until my patience and mellow levels are near peak ;-)

Damn noisy neighbors

Al Denelsbeck

… but I can cope with this kind of noise.

A few nights back, not too long after some long overdue rains, The Girlfriend and I went over to the pond to see what sunset was doing, and as the sky darkened… well, the video explains it better.


This was peak activity, but unfortunately the batteries in my video light were almost kaput, so more of the lighting is provided by the headlamp and The Girlfriend’s Sprog’s flashlight, so light color is widely variable – I apologize. I went out a few days later with the video light intact and found almost no activity.

The noise of the calls was overwhelming while we were at video distance – the Copes grey treefrog (Hyla chrysoscelis) could actually hurt your ears. As clear as many of the clips appear, almost none of these were in plain sight, but required sliding among, around, and under intervening branches, often at awkward angles, so the camera could only be handheld, but the new rig helped stabilize things quite a bit.

The only player in the video not to appear, in clips or stills, is the eastern narrowmouth toad (Gastrophryne carolinensis,) which looks like this (pic from a few years back):

Eastern narrowmouth toad Gastrophryne carolinensis perched on photographer's knee
And if you want to hear the call more distinctly, that can be found here. Subjects like this were a large part of my expanding into video in the first place.

By the way, before the grass clippings almost obscured the water’s surface, I did a few shots of the puddle residents, including some very small tadpoles.

unidentified tadpoles in flood puddle
I couldn’t tell you what these are, since I wasn’t there when the eggs were present, only that they’d sit comfortably on your thumbnail. I wonder if those ‘at home’ DNA tests would help?

So let me show you the current video rig, but bear in mind, this is typically a mere moment in time; probably before too long, this will change again as I refine its uses.

DSLR macro video rig of author's
A few words about what you’re seeing here. First off, the whole box contraption is a video ‘cage’ that I picked up used; it also came with the shoulder mount, which has yet to see use and may not very often, since my video subjects often require very specific angles and positions, and ‘from the shoulder’ is not usually among the choices, but I may use it for bird video at some point. It has been modified, since I always use camera bodies with the extended battery grips on the bottom, and the clearance with the top bar was barely adequate, so that’s been raised 20mm. Also, the side grips were notoriously bad about creaking with any motion, but I discovered a way to fix that and will likely document that later on. If you want to know before then, feel free to ask – I just don’t want to do another post right at the moment.

Top left (pic-wise) is the video light, also used, runs on 4 AA batteries or a USB battery pack, more than adequately bright for macro work – when it has fresh batteries, anyway. Some generic Chinese model, but it works damn well, so I’m cool with it. It’s on a ‘Magic Arm’ articulated extension, all joints lock down with that knob in the middle, and yes, these also work damn well.

Just to the side of that is a video mic, a Takstar SGC-598. Listen, I’m nothing if not frugal and critical of my purchases, and while the ‘toppa-da-line’ mic choices may come highly recommended, they’re also expensive as hell, and right now macro video is not bringing in the money to justify that expense. But in side-by-side comparisons, the Takstar rated almost indistinguishable from a Rode model, for less than a quarter the price, and I picked it up used for even less. An off-camera mic is highly recommended, because the on-camera versions aren’t very good dynamically, and pick up all the little noises from the body itself, including focusing, lens adjustments, and even shifting your grip.

In the center (with the blue bits) is another grip for the cage, very useful for low-level shots and just carrying the rig around.

Top right is the off-camera monitor. Earlier I’d made one that worked fine, but it had two significant liabilities: it didn’t have terribly high resolution, and was no better in bright light than the LCD on the back of the camera body. Then I ran across someone selling a used HDMI model with the flip-up eyepiece so it can be used either way, and treated myself. A little expensive, not much, but well worth the money once I started using it. Biggest liability is, it takes several seconds to pick up the signal from the body and turn on.

It’s supported, by the way, with a mini double-ballhead arm, a few bucks online, and yes, they tighten down very well. though you can’t see the knob in the center from this perspective. I always miss something when doing ‘product’ shots…

Underneath it all is my ‘new’ macro tripod, actually my 20-year-old full-size Bogen 3401 that I’d replaced a few years back with a more capable tripod. Late last year, I got a brainstorm and ended up cutting down each leg segment a precise amount with a pipe cutter, creating this low-level, extremely stable version. The legs still spread to almost flat, and the center column has been modified to be able to shorten to a stub for ground level work; the hex-wrench to loosen these bolts rides in the rubber cap at the base of the column (hidden in the grass here.) One of these days I’ll do a post on all the gear modifications that I’ve performed to make my pursuits easier. Now if I could only modify the video editing software to cut down the extravagant time that takes…

On this date 22

Al Denelsbeck

mist rising off Skaneateles Lake, NY
So it would appear that, fourteen years ago in 2006, I was visiting my family up in central New York, since this is mist rising off of Skaneateles Lake, one of the Finger Lakes in the center of the state – if you want to know how to pronounce that, saying, “skinny-AT-less” won’t earn you too many funny looks from the locals. It looks like a typical NY winter in this pic, and might well have been chilly, but it wasn’t that cold. I know I was driving around with my dad and trying to find a way to make a scene out of the twisting vapor on the water before it disappeared, and settled on this. I like the foreground elements, anyway…

We now jump ahead seven years.

closeup of head of unidentified lady beetle species
This one is a little out-of-sync, or something, because it was 2012 when I really kicked in the arthropod photography and cataloged about every life stage of lady beetles (Coccinellidae,) but this was taken in 2013 instead. Nonetheless, the head detail is appreciable, if I do say so myself, and I like how it makes it obvious that the white bit is not the head, but the ‘shoulders’ of sorts, a shield over the thorax called the pronotum. The coloration is aposematic, bright and contrasty ‘keepaway’ hues that are memorable to predators, because lady beetles have a method of discouraging predation: they can produce hemolymph, their blood, from their joints and it’s apparently pretty distasteful – I’d managed to obtain some images of it back then and thought that I’d posted some, but can’t find them. I’ll follow up shortly – I can’t do it here because they weren’t taken on this date.

bumblebee on pickerel weed pontederia flower
Five years ago in 2015, I was at a nearby pond (no, not that one, but another, further off but not far,) chasing what the pickerelweed (Pontederia) had to offer, and this image first appeared back then. The little jumping spider was also taken on that date, but some of the others in that post were taken on previous days – I’m almost positive none were taken on any subsequent days. My memory is just that good.

Gotta be either a mantis or a frog

Al Denelsbeck

I’m in a rut, I know. And it’s gonna get worse.

green treefrog Hyla cinerea on oak-leaf hydrangea Hydrangea quercifolia
This… is the look you receive when you hear someone’s name and make a pun on it, only they’ve been hearing the same pun since they were three and are wondering if the homicide judge will see it the same way.

Anyway, this green treefrog (Hyla cinerea) was perched on the oak-leaf hydrangea (Hydrangea quercifolia) this morning, the one that had spent last year in a pot but got transplanted in front of the dining room window a few weeks ago and appears quite pleased with the move. Wasn’t expecting to see a treefrog using it but I’m cool with that, as you already know.

And it’s a taste of things to come, as I have some video to edit. Maybe a day or two. Meanwhile, Buggato has crowed that he will be chasing beach and storm pictures while I am at work, but here I am at home shooting and his blog is closing on two months without an entry, past-dated or no. Ah well…

BIAB: Out of the far reaches

Al Denelsbeck

All right, we’re gonna get a bit weird with this one. Yes, even for this site, so you’ve been warned.

I obtained the 45rpm vinyl phonograph of my featured song here back in 1978 or ’79, in my adolescence, but eventually lost all of my 45s among the many moves I’ve made over the years, and I probably hadn’t listened to it for years at that point anyway – I had moved on to cassettes and then CDs, and no longer even had a record player. A few years back, I remembered it and decided to look it up again, eventually downloading it as an MP3, which just demonstrates how many format changes have occurred in music – and to be honest, when first released in 1978, it was probably available on 8-track tape too, a truly horrible format that didn’t die the painful death it deserved.

Oh, hell, let’s sidetrack a little, because the topic isn’t going to be harmed by it. 8-track tapes were a continuous loop deal, maximum of 80 minutes but usually much shorter, feeding out of the center of the spool and back around the outside as they played, and because of this the cartridge that housed them was thick and clunky, measuring 14x10x2 cm (5.5x4x.75 inches.) Much worse, they required breaking up the contents into four sections (of stereo tracks, thus the 8) with a track-change sector at the end, which the player would detect and automatically, and noisily, jump the playback head over to the next pair of tracks. You would be listening to the music, which would die out, a moment or three of silence, a loud clack! as the head switched, and eventually the music would fade back in again – this was extremely annoying if it happened in the middle of a goddamn song, as it often did because albums rarely constrained themselves to perfect fits for the format. You could fast-forward, or select the next track (which would pick up as far along as you’d reached on the previous track,) but that was it. Just terrible. And if you didn’t clean your player semi-routinely, the tape would get stuck to the feed rollers and unspool into your player, requiring lots of disentanglement and the almost-assured death of that album.

Where were we? Ah, yes, The Carpenters, who I think the majority of people have heard of but not many people ever hear, because their songs are a bit dated and they stopped recording in the early ’80s. Their style was not an interest of mine, with one small exception, and it’s an obscure track that even people current with its release have forgotten. To understand it… well, there may not be any understanding of it, but regardless, let’s put things into perspective. The ’70s had seen another resurgence of fascination with alien visitation and UFOs, somehow bringing together the space race and the more mystical new-age elements, while in ’77 both Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind had hit the theaters, so there was a huge swing to space-related media.

Another digression. Star Wars really did present a paradigm shift in science fiction when it was released. Up until then, sci-fi was all about sleek, clean, and crisp spaceships, sleek, clean, and crisp jumpsuits, generally weak video effects, and weedo weedo audio effects. Star Wars introduced weathering, with damaged and patched, complicated and chunky spaceships and special effects that far surpassed anything seen or heard to date, and by those tokens seemed altogether more realistic (except for the plot, but few were paying attention to that.) Presented with this popular new idea, movie and TV production companies responded with… sleek, clean, and crisp spaceships, sleek, clean, and crisp jumpsuits, generally weak video effects, and weedo weedo audio effects. Don’t ask me how they missed the boat in this manner, but they did.

And in the midst of this resurgence, The Carpenters released, “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft.” And you can be excused if you feel there’s kind of a clash between style and substance here.

Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft – The Carpenters

Karen Carpenter had an amazing voice, with a good range and remarkable timbre and tonality, and it’s used to best extent here. The Carpenters gravitated towards the folksy, sometimes honky-tonk sound (and there was no one more honky, to be sure,) which never attracted my attention. This one did, however, even though now I cringe more than a little. Lemme ‘splain. In my adolescence, I was very much into the UFO/Bigfoot/Nessie crowd – I had the books, I followed the media, I gave way too much weight to the unsubstantiated and anecdotal stories that lacked any kind of decent evidence; the shift to critical thinking happened over a long period of time undefined by any particular demarcations, but sometime after the period of this song. I wasn’t so enamored that I felt “World Contact Day” was a great idea, and didn’t even know the ramifications of it, but the lyrics themselves spell it out adequately, and yes, it was a real movement – how embraced it was, among what percentage of the population, I cannot say, but the concept really was to have everyone telepathically sending their message to the stars all at the same time. Yeah, I find that flaky as hell nowadays, and won’t play this song in public despite it being a musically strong composition.

Most of the credit for that aspect goes to a group named Klaatu, who wrote and recorded it originally a year or so earlier – The Carpenters’ version is a cover. You can hear the original here, and I actually like the opening. It’s an ambitious composition involving a lot of different aspects, but desperately in need of better mixing.

So was the underlying message of the song actually espoused by The Carpenters, or was it just a project to reimagine the music since, again, it departs from their typical fare by a good degree? It’d be easy to believe the latter, but then, there’s the TV special. Seriously, I have to embed it here – see how far you can get.


The Carpenters – Space Encounters on YouTube

If you took the seventies, distilled them down and filtered them, compressed and dehydrated them into a concentrate, you would still end up with something less potent, less quintessential, than that – future generations have access to this thanks to someone’s efforts in converting a VHS recording of the original broadcast, which is heroic because, as it is said, those that cannot remember history are condemned to repeat it. It’s worth noting that the ’70s were chock-full of musical specials and variety shows (John Davidson was actually spawned in this blighted environment,) so this special was largely just another attempt to cash in on the trend and ride the wave of both Star Wars and Close Encounters while assiduously avoiding every last facet that made those popular – TV executives were and are remarkably brain-damaged folk.

All that said (for no reason at all,) I retain mixed feelings about the song, which is musically, vocally, and compositionally very solid – I’m just not on board with the lyrics anymore ;-)

1 … 146 147 148 149 150 … 327