July 7,

Limited success

Al Denelsbeck

About seven weeks ago, I was at the neighborhood pond without my camera (hush – it was a spur-of-the-moment thing) and spotted a green heron, not too unusual, except that this one seemed to be half to two-thirds normal size. Even the young tend to be just shy of adult size and weight when they leave the nest, and this one was displaying adult plumage. An example of dwarfism in avians? I honestly didn’t know, but I wanted a photo of it. Thus started my quest to find it again, returning semi-regularly armed with the camera and long lens, which naturally meant that I saw no signs of it again.

Until today.

small adult green heron Butorides virescens perched on semi-submerged branch
Only thing was, this time I wasn’t trying for wildlife, and while I had the camera (duryea!), I wasn’t carrying the heavy, bulky long lens with me, because I also had an infra-red camera along – long story, but I’m kinda on assignment for some particular images, and it isn’t even a dedicated IR camera, but the ancient (in digital camera terms anyway) Canon Pro90 IS, which will do infra-red in a pinch. So this image was taken with the Canon 7D and 18-135 STM instead, and limited by 135mm, I was forced to creep closer while not appearing to creep closer. The heron accepted this for a while, and then decided discretion was wiser and all that, and flew off, but I could see that it just cruised around the point of the island in the pond. So I hiked back, ditched the IR for the long lens, and returned.

I did eventually track it down, but significantly father away now so the edge of the long lens was diminished, and the choice of backgrounds and positions almost nil.

very small adult green heron Butorides virescens perched on snag
The main issue with both of these, which I knew I’d be facing the moment I first saw the bird weeks ago, is that there is no way to determine size or scale. What I really need is another green heron of normal proportions immediately alongside, close enough to be in the same frame, or really, any other bird of recognizable size. The chances of achieving this are small, given that I’ve only seen two or three green herons at the pond this entire season, and no evidence of nesting activity so not even any young to be venturing out soon.

During all this I sweated out roughly a liter of fluids, though not from the enormous exertion of getting these photos, rather from the stifling heat; that’s the heron panting in the first photo, and it was svelte and holding still, so you can imagine the effect on my fat ass (well, if you’ve met me in person anyway, since I don’t publish the photos that show reality.) This is part of the reason you haven’t been seeing much here (the heat I mean,) but only part. We’ll see if that can be corrected soon.

Sorting finds n+1

Al Denelsbeck

It’s happened before: when sorting through recent photos to see what is discarded and what is kept (and subsequently sorted into appropriate categories,) I will find a photo or three that I didn’t feature back around the time that I took them, but feel they deserve some recognition. This happens often enough, in fact, that I decided to make it a category, but since I don’t know how many times I’ve already done it, we’re just assigning that unknown value to n and going from there.

[Does anyone know why the first variable presented is almost always ‘n‘? Is there a clever reason behind this, or is it just short for “number”? Please make up something else if this really is the answer.]

Anyway, I had to go through 1,055 images tonight, but it went quicker than normal because of the large percentage that fit into just two categories: Birds and Mammals. My Mammals folder, always a rather thin one, has expanded nicely courtesy of the beavers, but more on them will be along shortly. For now, we have birds.

great blue heron Ardea herodias silhouetted against sunset ripple patterns
I could have saved this one for the end-of-the-month abstract, but I think I’ve already done one like this – I know I used a similar image for a bullshit post. I just liked how a bare amount of facial detail from this great blue heron (Ardea herodias) remained visible in these lighting conditions.

Next up, we have a cooperative juvenile bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus):

juvenile bald eagle Haliaeetus leucocephalus glaring down from above
I’ve featured images of this same eagle before – maybe even in two separate posts – but I liked how this very tight crop still held up in sharpness and detail, and gives a very different impression from the reality of a remarkably mellow raptor.

And finally, an osprey (Pandion haliaetus):

osprey Pandion haliaetus almost directly overhead preparing to dive
Offered in contrast to the previous image, this isn’t too majestic or noble, and that’s the point – I liked the awkwardness of it. It comes from being underneath the bird as it prepared to dive after a fish, cropped tighter for the drama… or, whatever. It has the look of someone who has definitely bounced too high and not quite accurately on the trampoline. But that goes without saying.

By the way, I always have something to listen to when I’m sorting, and this last batch took one episode of The Geologic Podcast and half an episode of the original Hitchhiker’s Guide. However, there are still 204 video clips awaiting my attention, and those take a lot longer…

Macro photography, part 10: Evolution

Al Denelsbeck

In the part nine post, I talked about having to create a new method of portable macro lighting because I trashed my old method, and while this was functional, there were a few small problems with it. The coverage was a little narrow and specific, while being hard to aim, and it sometimes produced odd reflections. But the worst bit was the weight. The Metz 40 MZ-3i is a wonderfully capable flash unit, but balanced it’s not – it’s fairly heavy, and it suffers from a decision made decades ago that few have yet addressed, which is the position of the hot shoe on a camera. Sitting right atop the prism housing and so directly in front of the user’s forehead, a flash unit cannot extend backwards from the shoe mount or it will interfere with putting one’s eye to the viewfinder; that leaves left or right (usually interfering with camera controls on the top of the body,) straight up, or out to the front. Many flashes are aligned straight up, but the Metz goes out to the front, which means the weight is mostly away from the mount. This becomes much worse if you try to mount the flash on something like a small ballhead or anything else that allows precision aiming, because off-center weight requires a lot of friction to stabilize, and most small ballheads can’t cut it.

On an off-again, on-again basis I looked for other solutions, mostly the idea of a much smaller and lighter flash unit that could still do manual output; this has not been a priority among manufacturers. To paraphrase their typical thinking, if you want manual output, you must be experienced/professional, and you’ll want a lot of other bells & whistles too and will be willing to pay a shitload of money for a lighting unit. There’s one exception, the MeiKe MK-300, but the reviews of it aren’t so hot. Did no one, ever, make a small manual-output flash unit?

Sunpak Auto 322 flash strobe unitThe webbernets is great, I have to admit. Yes, someone did make one at one time, and it turns out to be the same manufacturer as my previous flat-panel flash: Sunpak. The Sunpak Auto 322, while long discontinued, is a flexible little unit with a bundle of aiming options, a built-in PC sync cord, and manual output ranging from full to 1/32nd power, as well as thyristor-controlled automatic exposure. It can flop 180° atop the shoe mount, sitting to the left, right, or vertically, and the smaller flash head can pivot 180° on its own, as can be seen in my image. It is a little bigger than palm size but about half of the weight of the Metz and much better balanced. It runs off four AA batteries and has a Guide Number of 24m/80′ – not the strongest flash you’ll find, but more than adequate for macro work.

Now, all that’s well and good, but the secret to flash photography is controlling the spotlight effect, and that means a reflector/diffuser. After a lot of careful measurements and a bit of cutting and gluing, I’d created an attachment out of black matboard (so, dense cardboard,) aluminum foil, and a sheet of almost sheer white material. The entire inner surface is coated in foil and thus reflective, all exiting from the round opening with the sheet of white material to diffuse the light a bit more. While it increases the size of the flash quite a bit, it still remains manageable and is only slightly smaller in output surface that the flat-panel flash unit, while producing a round light source. Those thick white stripes you see in my image are patches of slightly tacky vinyl, glued to the tapered head of the flash to give my softbox more purchase. All together, it looks like this:

Sunpak Auto 322 with custom diffuser attached
The top surface slopes down to a point at the front, allowing the light to bounce down through the opening, while the opening itself is far enough from the flash head that there is no chance of direct light hitting the subject – this prevents strong highlights in reflections from eyes, for instance. The round shape is more natural-looking in those same reflections, and the opening is 13cm across, so big enough to provide wide coverage for most macro subjects. Instead of being a spot source like a flashlight or spotlight, the light comes from the entire surface and provides more coverage and softer shadows. Most importantly, it’s easily portable, and light enough to position in countless ways.

Sunpak Auto 322 and diffuser mounted to camera
Being offset to the side like this, a heavy flash unit is quite noticeable, so this lighter rig is a lot more manageable. It’s mounted on a seven-inch “Magic Arm,” a slick little mount with two ballheads and a pivot joint in the middle, all tightened by just one knob – lots of positioning options, but ridiculously overpriced unless you shop around a bit (*cough* Chinese Ebay listings *cough*.) The grey thing spanning between the camera and flash unit is, of course, a Manfrotto 330B macro bracket seen in part one.

The real test, naturally, is how the images taken with this lighting rig look, and I’ll let you judge for yourself, since it was used exclusively for the images in this post, and this one, and this one, and this, and even this (the first image excepted – that’s natural light.) I’m pleased with it, even though I may add a small fill-reflector to help balance out those shadowed areas opposite the light unit.

But, I made a passing mention a little earlier of how studio macro work can still go wrong, so let’s take a quick look at one of the more amusing, though bizarre, examples. I had captured two tiny amphibians and was shooting them in a shallow tray on the back porch, using some leaves a a natural setting. I had provided a thin layer of water to keep my subjects moist and support the typical conditions, and highly reflective aspects of the setting or subject can be a problem at times. In this case, I was using a gooseneck LED desk lamp for focusing, throwing a lot of light to help nail optimum sharpness (for instance, when using the reversed Sigma 28-105 with its fixed aperture of f16, which makes the viewfinder image quite a bit darker than normal.) There’s such a thing as the wrong angle, though:

tiny amphibian with horrendous reflections
That long solid reflection over the foreleg is bad enough, but the colander effect from the LED lamp is just hideous, and a bit surreal. The only use such an image could be put to is a blog post on lighting failures so, uh, yeah…

She has a great personality

Al Denelsbeck

I enjoy doing this.

Last night while out poking around, I chanced upon a fairly small spider that, once I unloaded the images, motivated me to go out and get better, closer ones. I’m very pleased with this portrait:

portrait of crab spider Tmarus angulatus
Some spiders are menacing, or ominous. Some are even cute. This one’s just ugly. In fact, I see a resemblance to that Star Wars character that lost his arm over bringing a blaster to a cantina lightsaber fight…

Now, it’s funny; I suspect somehow this is not going to be a crowd favorite, and might even provoke some negative reactions from at least a few people, hard as that may be to imagine. But I’m fine with that, and in fact, posted this precisely because it may generate those reactions. It’s not just the aspect that not everything in the world is pretty, or should be – there is also a certain delight in showing an image that elicits any kind of strong reaction. That’s often what photographers want; that’s what anyone who creates something wants. I didn’t make the spider ugly, but I was able to bring this aspect to the viewer (hopefully, anyway) dramatically and undeniably. The page came up and said, “Boo!” – and if you reacted, it worked as intended.

Moreover, from a sheer photographic standpoint it’s pretty solid. Not just the eyes are in focus, but the whole ‘face’ and starting down the pedipalps, even though you can see the focus is so short at this magnification that the posterior lateral eyes (the ones sitting wide that face off to the sides) are even fuzzing out. The spider measures about a millimeter between the main eyes that we’re focusing on – those back eyes are, what, 0.2mm away? How easy was it to miss this crucial distance, do you think? [I have a few frames where I did, just to let you know.] And the light angle shows the shapes and coloration very well – there’s a catchlight in four of those eyes, for dog’s sake! Everything angled down across the frame, virtually no distractions – there are a lot of ways this image could have been worse, and I know all of them from experience. This was shot handheld (though braced against a fence) and focused in pitch darkness by the light of a flashlight – since this was with the reversed 28-105mm (and the same lighting rig seen there,) focus is achieved by distance, and not assisted by the camera or lens at all. There was definitely skill involved, but I cannot discount the huge part that luck played as well.

crab spider Tmarus angulatus full body shot
This is a crab spider, by the way – I’m almost certain a Tmarus angulatus, and she measures 15mm from the back of the abdomen to the tip of those forelegs. Definitely a female, and the leaf that she’s perched upon, wrapped up tight in webbing, is probably protecting her eggs – that odd shape is what captured my attention in the first place, and then I spotted the grey line atop when I leaned in for a closer look. Remarkably cooperative, too; after the first pics like the one here, I went back out to find that she’d moved from position, but a couple of gentle nudges with a bit of pinestraw (about the only use it can be put to) caused her to return to the same place, just facing the other direction. An awful lot of species would panic and drop from sight, or scamper into deep cover, so credit to the model’s blasé attitude towards direction from the photographer.

Just an observation

Al Denelsbeck2 Comments

The Girlfriend is the one who decides how the bathroom is laid out, and to an observant person, this becomes obvious. The wastebasket is positioned in such a way that it is virtually impossible to successfully land a bit of trash in it from any point in the room. While I could not care less about sports, I still possess enough Y-chromosomes to find actually walking up to a trash can and dropping something in it from directly above to be frustrating, way out of proportion to the effort involved. Which naturally means that I increase this effort by making the attempt to hit the basket from across the room anyway, almost invariably necessitating the retrieval of the failure. Women may not understand this, but men don’t understand purses, so that’s how it goes.

Anyway, it’s not news to anyone that it’s been extremely hot for the past few weeks, which means little to photograph and even less that I haven’t already featured. Most of the recent posts by others that I might have commented on I find I’ve already covered, in principle anyway. I have otherwise been concentrating on site updates which, while minor, still takes up time. So there really hasn’t been much to post.

For the time being, have a giant stag beetle (Lucanus elaphus,) and I’ll try to find something of interest soon.