Right at the moment, most of the current images I have to feature are more insects, and even I believe there’s a limit, while there are few other topics that I feel motivated to tackle, so we’re going archive here. I keep thinking I’m going to attempt this technique again, but it’s been something like 13 years now and I haven’t done it yet…
This is me, standing
A very recent Monday color image this time, taken just a few days ago when a narrow-winged tree cricket nymph (Oecanthus niveus) posed at night on a geranium blossom. Some mist or dew would have been nice, but it wasn’t happening that night.
I realize I started a pattern with posting abstract images on the last day of March and April, then pathetically let this lapse for May. So, for June we will have two.
Neither of these need explaining, of course, so I will end the text here, and simply let the images speak for themselves. Stop raising your eyebrow skeptically – I have not been kidnapped and replaced with an exact duplicate.
One more courtesy of Jim Kramer’s Alaska trip, which I saved for the Monday color post. I’m not even going to try to identify it – the botany is for someone else. Just appreciate the colors and contrast.
Since it is now ‘officially’ summer, we will perversely jump back to almost the only color to be found in wintertime, holly berries in full fruit against the brilliant green of the leaves and a rich blue sky. I will admit to being quite pleased that we can find skies like this throughout North Carolina winters having grown up in central New York, the winters there spelled
This has appeared before, but it remains a nice color image so I’m using it again. Plus it has callback value!
The surreal effect was generated by shooting in natural light at f4, which produced an extremely short depth-of-field that let most of the frame go into soft focus while only a few portions of the subject stayed sharp. But there’s another detail to the effect that is visible
This is one example of matching light to your subject. I often recommend that, when the light is bright and high-contrast, photographers should seek low-contrast subjects, and this is an example of the opposite: a high-contrast subject shot in low-contrast, near overcast lighting. The shadows are kept under control, but more importantly, the highlights don’t get too strong
The purpose of these weekly posts was to present a splash of color, originally in the winter when such was scarce, but either way just as a cheery visual thing. I’m not sure how well this works when the color is from a cluster of tiny spiderlings, but if you haven’t determined this about me by now, well, it’s par for the course.
I haven’t identified these, but they look to
I’ve been busy largely with yard work today, but I stumbled across this one and had to feature it. A quite large jumping spider, likely Phidippus audax, was contemplatively grasping some iridescent beetle that was still struggling, and the flash rig brought out the collection of colors pretty well. By the way, “quite large,” translates to, “about
We haven’t done red in a while, and it’s a color fairly well underrepresented in my stock, mostly because I dislike it – which is weird. Why should we like or dislike any one color over another? What thing in our brains is responsible for this? I mean, I can see the evolutionary benefits of recognizing bright colors as signifying ripe fruit or good weather and so on, but