Just a quick pair of pics, taken less than an hour ago. There will be another post coming, hopefully before the day is out, that has more of those words that you all love so much, but for now, we have color.
And a moon. And if you look closely, Venus. I think it’s Venus.
Yeah, just checked through Stellarium – it’s Venus. You might see it better later on, depends.
This week, we’re going back just three years, partially because this image shows typical conditions for the season, which is the deluge of pine pollen that occurs. Those are the little yellow specks all over the main subject, which I am taking to be a short-tailed ichneumon wasp (Genus Ophion) – that seems to be what BugGuide is indicating, though their listed identifying characteristics are all not visible in this photo, so who knows? Those long antennae are impressive, but leave it up to entomologists to name the species after its smaller abdomen, instead – that’s just rude. Ichneumons are petite wasps that are parasitic in nature, laying their eggs in caterpillars so they hatch out in a living specimen and consume it from the inside – Darwin had some choice heretical words about this. They’re not protective of nests since they don’t have them, so as wasps go they’re mellow and not very reactive – you’d have to grab them to get stung.
And another from the same day, because. I was out at the nearby pond after sunset as the Canada geese were departing, so used the sparse twilight sky color as best I could.
I’ve mentioned in two previous posts about a trip to the NC Botanical Gardens, a session The Girlfriend and I did before their closing, and I would have warned you about the closing had I had more than a day’s notice myself. Note that this just applies to the gardens proper; the nature trails out back remain open.
Anyway, I was hoping to see at least a Carolina anole (Anolis carolinensis,) which can often be found in the garden but I wasn’t sure if it was a little too early yet, the warm temperatures still fairly new. The activity that we found was not just gratifying, it was better than any previous trip, so I’m counting this one as successful. Above, the first anole in evidence scampered warily along a fenceline, pausing just for a moment as I loomed in closer to get the detail shots, then slipping around behind to avoid us. With typical behavior, though, it peeked out to see if we’d moved on, and I was ready.
I have a few frames like this, shot within about three seconds, with subtle differences as the anole surveyed the surroundings – I was holding still, except for the index finger twitching on the shutter release. This frame, however, conveyed more of a sense of horror, solely from the eye position because expressions on reptiles really don’t change.
Not even a minute later, I was examining the palmlike plants (I can’t recall their name and am not wasting more time looking) that the anoles prefer the most, and found another one, providing a fetching pose that I particularly like.
I just like the idea that the lizard was doing its best to camouflage itself while getting some sun, but in a way became more obvious, at least when seen from this angle. Still, most people blow right past displays like this, never paying close attention and already having considered the kindapalms as ‘uninteresting’ – they have no flowers, after all. Their loss, of course (the unobservant people, not the unpalms.)
Meanwhile, my subject knew we were there and peeked out to check on us.
I get the impression of a reptilian carpenter checking the accuracy of their cut. But maybe that’s just me ’cause, you know, lizards have no expression. This is a tight crop of the original, partially because the semipalms made me keep my distance (the anole being more to the center of the plant,) but we really needed to see the scale detail here, and that shading ridge ahead of the eye.
Elsewhere in the garden, a skink was also checking out the lovely day.
This is an American five-lined skink (Plestiodon fasciatus,) which make occasional appearances in our own yard, at least one living within the bricks of the front porch – I mean, probably not this one, but one of the same species. I would like to convince the anoles to come live here but have no idea how to do that, short of catching a few and introducing them, but I’m not sure the habitat is what they’re after. The skink here was reasonably mellow and I was able to switch sides of the planter and go in for the portrait while the skink struck a no-nonsense board meeting pose.
No, that’s just silly; reptiles don’t have expressions. I think I heard that once.
As we’d entered the garden, I expressed my intentions to look for lizards and snakes, even though the snakes tend to be few and far between within the gardens themselves, and The Girlfriend remembered a previous visit and suggested we check out the walls of the gift shop and plant sale area. The shop was closed and the plant shelves empty, but as we approached, she pointed ahead and said, “There you go.” I looked in the indicated direction and saw another anole scampering around the empty tables, so I crept in for a few more frames. After a minute or so, she inquired rather sharply as to what I was doing, and when I told her I was shooting the anole that she’d pointed out, she corrected me with amusement; she hadn’t meant the diminutive lizard (which she’d never seen,) but the nigh-two-meter black snake sprawled across the walkway in plain sight beyond it, already attracting the attention of two other photographers. Remember what I said about people missing the small details? No? Good.
Black rat snakes (Pantherophis obsoletus) are the largest snakes in the region, and this was the largest I’ve seen in years, perhaps just shy of my own body length and as thick as a garden hose. The other photographers told me it had emerged from along one wall and was making its way unhurriedly across the middle of the garden public area, but there were few visitors so it was remaining mostly unnoticed. Eventually, it slipped casually into a planting bed with thick undergrowth and largely disappeared from view while I maneuvered around for more of a head shot. I was just remarking that we wouldn’t see much unless it decided to rear its head, which I considered unlikely due to it foraging for food species, when it reared its head. Well, fine – happy to be wrong.
The scattered clouds abruptly parted for a few moments, providing some nice distinct light for some shine on the scales, and the snake sampled the air with its tongue several times as we watched. The image above is better for the angle on the head, but the one below shows the tongue better, so I’m providing both.
I had to crop these pretty tightly, because it emerged right alongside one of the many plant identifying signs throughout the garden that I found distracting. After a moment, the snake slipped back down and disappeared from sight with elaborate casualness.
Just a little beyond that The Girlfriend stopped, having seen some movement and unsure if it was a leaf on the gusty day. Then she confirmed her suspicions and pointed out another Carolina anole on the ground alongside some plant pots. I came up from behind and did a couple of frames, noting the color change that helped it blend into both the gravel walkway substrate and dried leaves in the area.
You can see the distinct demarcation at the base of the tail, and I had a vague impression of an incompletely shed skin like I’ve seen before, but other images (getting ahead of myself a tad) show it to be a clear line everywhere, and I’m thinking it’s a new tail that replaced one dropped/taken during an encounter with a predator.
The anole paused for a moment, then scampered quickly across the open area towards a region of shadow near a bench, and we dismissed it. We hadn’t left the immediate vicinity though, and were discussing the various trees in bloom when we spotted it atop the bench. I was thinking that the reptile had scaled it with remarkable speed when I saw another down on one of the legs, which was the first we’d seen; the one atop the bench was another anole altogether. This was worth pausing for, to see if they’d even notice each other, and whether we’d see some mating or territorial behavior if they did.
We were not disappointed.
It seems possible that the first that we’d seen had spotted the second, on the bench top, from some distance away and was hurrying to dispute the land claim, but I’m not sure how good their distance vision is. They drew within range and quickly commenced their dominance displays, which consist of head-bobbing and repeatedly flaring their dewlaps, the bright pink semicircle under their chins. Neither one had any intention of backing down, and pretty soon they were drawing closer together and circling warily. Ourselves, we weren’t budging a millimeter.
[The autofocus, up until then behaving as intended, now tried to lock onto the background flowers through the slats of the bench, so I quickly switched to manual for a bit but didn’t quite nail focus on the wider shot at right, so this is as large as I’m making it. They get better, though.]
Notable now was the change in coloration, especially the dark spots behind the eyes, and the raising of the crest on their head and neck, both something that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. I’ve watched very brief territorial displays where one quickly concedes to another without altercation, but this was not to be the case today, and I switched over to video mode.
And a quick still frame, between video clips, of the victor looking smug. No, that’s ludicrous; reptiles don’t have expressions. I suspect that’s urine staining the bench from when the loser was seized bodily and thrown (momentarily) from the ring.
By the way, this is the one we first saw, with the discolored tail, which was ever-so-slightly larger than the other, and the victor of all encounters. I cannot say if it took ownership of the bench away from the other, or discovered an interloper on its own territory while on the ground some meters away, and the second was not easily convinced to give up, but eventually the matter was settled. While this was going on, I managed some detailed frames of the color display from the larger one.
The dewlap is obvious of course, the crest slightly less so, but I want to point out the rust-to-brown color on the head, the mottled stripes on the legs, and of course the eye spot. I may have mentioned, sometime in the distant past, that reptiles don’t have expressions, but that’s patently untrue. They don’t have expressions like we expect to see, but these colors definitely communicate intent and/or mood, and in an encounter with a notably smaller specimen they likely say, “Get lost,” very well, though they’re seen as a challenge to another that’s of comparable size.
We had seen plenty by this point, including some flowers, and started making our way back to the exit, but the reptilian gods weren’t done with us. On a small wooden bridge just ahead of us in the quiet garden, a juvenile fence lizard was basking, remaining largely motionless even as I knelt painfully (that substrate gravel gets everywhere and digs into one’s knees) nearby for a better angle.
Eastern fence lizards (Sceloporus undulatus) do not seem to be as numerous in the area as skinks or anoles, but they’re both quite shy and remarkably well camouflaged for their favored habitats, so it’s possible that they’re too easy to miss while numbering much closer to the others – I know I hear plenty of sudden rustles not far from the path when hiking, which could easily be one getting under cover. This one was only about ten centimeters in overall length, counting that tail, and they can get many times this mass as adults. They have a pleasantly spiky sharp appearance but their skin isn’t really sharp – biting is more of their defense when it comes to personal encounters. And because I’m here, I’m including a couple of images from way back that I sized for blog use but never used then, because this post is kinda thin on expressive reptile portraits.
This is a mating pair, snagged in action while out at Duke Forest, if I remember correctly, and it shows off their peculiar electric blue belly scales a little – what purpose these serve I can’t say, but they’re almost impossible to see in any normal circumstances. The one benefit to spotting fence lizards is that they rely on their camouflage a lot, knowing that movement can attract more attention than appearance, and with a slow approach you can sometimes get within great photographic range.
And another. These were both taken on the same outing in May of 2010, but at different times during the day I think. Again, great textures and that splash of brilliant blue, not something that you expect to see from just about any species in this country. Maybe it’s just a vanity thing, the only color they can get away with while still avoiding hawks and crows. Yeah, that’s probably it…
Anyway, I think that covers us for reptiles for the remainder of the year. Now I’ll just have to concentrate on other things for the next nine months.
I did the ‘Monday Color’ topic years ago, and a version of this post title too, but it’s time for a revisit – it says so right here in my personal blog topics calendar. Which is a good thing to have if you want to, you know, post regular topics (not looking at anyone named Bugg, here.)
Anyway, the color:
These are blossoms of a ‘Little Star’ lungwort, (Pulmonaria genus I believe) that we found at the NC Botanical Gardens. There still wasn’t a whole lot of things in leaf, flower, or bloom yet, and due to their closing down for reasons unmentioned, won’t be anything more visible for a while yet. As you might be able to tell, the flowers aren’t very big, but they certainly were vivid, which prompted me to try playing around with monochrome again. First off, we’ll go with simply converting to greyscale.
Blerk, no. Wholly unimpressive. There was contrast in the colors, but not in the brightness thereof, so neutralizing the color registers made it too bland, which is why it’s often not the best idea to simply convert the image to greyscale, or desaturate, or however you manage it, in-camera or after the fact in an editing program. However, we have better tools in our arsenal, or at least, we do if we’ve been reading the previous posts on the topic or checking out the webpage (I have – have you?)
Let’s try the trick of converting each color to its own layer and looking at those.
Red channel. Nope. Slightly different from just greyscale, but not enough to merit any attention. Moving on.
Green channel. Almost completely indistinguishable from greyscale, even though the majority of the image is what we’d call ‘green.’ It’s a dark and muted green, not vivid, which means both the intensity of the green pixels is lower and there are a lot of other color pixels contributing to that register. But of course, we should expect a better response in the last channel.
Blue channel. Yeah, that’s the kind of contrast we’re talking about, and what we should expect if the dominant color in the frame is such a rich blue.
But… it might be considered a bit too intense, going a little bright and losing some of the petal detail, which was actually provided by shadows in the other color registers. There are still tricks to be played, however: with layer opacity, and layer masking.
Imagine if the image is painted on a clear surface, and you can have several of them stacked precisely atop one another (the ‘layers’ bit.) By changing the opacity of the top one, we’re in effect making the layer more and more transparent, like a tinted version, so the details of the layer beneath may show, and the amount of opacity dictates how much of each, so we can blend the two together by controlled amounts. Yet we might not want to blend all of the details between the two, and choose to keep some details from any layer at full-strength. So that’s the layer mask bit.
If you wipe away only part of the image in an upper layer, the layer beneath it will show through there only, so we can selectively have a bit from the top, and another bit from below. When you apply a layer mask, you then paint onto the mask itself with either white or black – white to keep the active layer, and black to ‘erase’ it and let the lower layer show through, but the best bit is that you can put it back by painting in white again, and fog the edges by using an airbrush, and so on.
So what we’re going to do is put the green on top, and drop the opacity down enough to keep some of the petal detail but mostly let the brightness of the blue layer’s petals show through. This also muted the darkness of the surrounding portions of the frame, taking away the contrast that makes monochrome work better, so then we’ll add a mask, in this case wholly white, and then paint the mask in selective areas with a broad airbrush in black, totally eliminating the green layer in those places to let the darker portions of the blue layer show through. It’s easy to make a mistake here, and easy to correct: just switch the color of the airbrush back to white and paint over your mistake, redoing it at will. Now let’s see what we get.
Now we have not as much contrast from the blossoms, but more detail and shaping, while retaining the dark shadows all around because they’re solely from the blue layer – no part of the green layer is visible around the outsides of the blossoms. You can also make it slightly easier by putting the blue layer on top if you like – I did it this way simply because green was already on top (after completely deleting the red channel, of course) but it also made it easier to change the opacity of the green layer to maintain just a bit of detail in the flowers.
So let’s review it. What we have here is mostly the blue channel, but the green is laid over top, just for the flower bits (everything else masked into invisibility,) and then the intact green bits are made more transparent by changing the layer opacity, until they’re adding just a little more shaping to the flowers. All of this can be adjusted to taste, and of course, you can do lots of other effects in images with the same technique: tweaking colors selectively, smoothing out textures or age wrinkles (the way I was first shown how to use layer masks,) and so on. Layers masks are a great blending and editing tool, even if you’re doing that no-no of combining multiple images together to add details that were never captured in the first place. If you haven’t tried this yet, well, now seems like a good time, right?
And yes, I still prefer the color version too, but this was a good exercise, so I chose to illustrate it.
Within a few days, I got a ton of photos to post, and then of course not a lot of time to post them, which is the way it goes. There will be another, image-heavy one to follow this, all tightly within a particular genre, so right now I’m doing the easier, briefer post. Not because I’m lazy, but because the other will take more time to prep and I don’t have as much right at the moment. Plus that whole build up thing.
Last year I started observing some sharp-shinned hawks (Accipiter striatus) that appeared to be in courting behavior very close by, along with what looked like a developing nest in the neighbor’s yard. That never came to be, but again this year, there is at least one hanging out, and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen a pair very close together, so we’ll just have to see what happens. I tend to shorten the name to “sharpshin” (because I am lazy,) but I’m making the effort to be more accurate here, at least initially. This one was roughly 80 meters off through a thicket of trees that will be much harder to see through within a few weeks, but has appeared in that region multiple times. Sharpshins are accipiters, fast and maneuverable medium-sized hawks that catch other birds in flight and have the talons to do it; you can get a glimpse of the long and thin toes in this image.
The weather became remarkably warm for a few days, then abruptly turned much cooler as a front pushed through, demonstrated last night as I grilled dinner on the back deck, first time this year, then forgot about leaving the grill open to cool until I heard the pouring rain. Dashing out there shirtless, I was treated to the coldest rain I’ve ever experienced, the water vastly colder than the ambient air but rapidly bringing it down, and the temperatures remain lower today, yet the spring burst has already begun. Here, an American sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua,) still retaining some seed pods from last year like the tree with the sharpshin, is also budding out with new growth, so I had to go slightly fartsy. It happens at times, don’t let it bother you – I’ll be back to critter portraiture soon enough.
The sunsets remain as unpredictable as always, at least for this area, and I keep seeing what looks like promising conditions that get my hopes up and impel me to go out to the nearby pond for photos. And then, in mere minutes as the colors would be developing, the clouds scatter impudently and the display is rather lackluster, a pattern that seems to hold true more often than not. The moment that I get disillusioned with this and just shrug off the impending sunset is when, naturally, the colors will burst forth and I’ll be there without my camera.
[I also have to note how many decent sunsets have occurred when I’m at work – the other work – unable to take advantage of them. I’m sure this is simply the bias of noticing the frustrations, not to mention how many I might have missed because I was paying no attention indoors, but it still irks.]
With that lead in, we have the sunset pics from the other evening, when the clouds scattered impudently and the display became rather lackluster.
The inclusion of yet another sweetgum tree helps disguise the fact that the colors didn’t do much, but can’t hide the jet contrail of course. And yes, you’re seen much this perspective before, at least if you’re a regular on this blog which means you actually haven’t, but there are only so many angles to catch sunset from there – something about the Earth only spinning the same way all the time. And the same can be said for the next shot. I mean, not about spinning the same way even though spinning is involved, but for too many shots like this. I still like them, okay?
I like the bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) trees, several of which line the pond’s edge, but did you immediately notice the tiny spider? I shoot these so I know they’re there, and thus never know how easily someone else spots them.
There is a small tree at the corner of the gate by the house that is slightly annoying throughout the summer months, because it has long thin branches that droop and thus get in the way as we go through the gate, but in this season it blooms, for a few days only, with extremely subtle tiny white flowers (8mm maximum) that nevertheless have a wonderful fragrance. I have once again tried to identify it and failed, probably because I’m using a database of NC native wildflowers and it’s not a native, instead being landscaped. If you know, feel free to submit the name of the plant along with five dollars for a processing fee and I’ll be sure to include your name in a future post.
I did some nighttime exploring of the backyard a few nights back, and among other things that will appear later, I was finding the evidence of the vernal re-activity (before the temperature dropped, anyway.) Most notable was the very pattering discreet sound like the rain was just starting, even though it wasn’t, and I stalked it around the yard before realizing what it was.
These are common as muck around here, most especially in our yard, and are known as American giant millipedes (Narceus americanus.) True to form, they can get in the range of 100mm in length, thicker than a pencil, and it was their foraging and exploring in a yard full of dried leaves that I was hearing. There are literally thousands within a small plot, impossible to avoid, and for the most part harmless; handling them might get them to discharge a substance that stains the skin and that some people apparently react to, but it’s never affected me in the slightest, and most times they don’t even bother. But realizing that the soft sounds in the leaves were caused by their activity became slightly creepy (The Girlfriend emphatically denies the ‘slightly’ bit.)
On a fencepost, a wobbling wart revealed itself to be an unidentified beetle, probably a type of weevil, that still sported some of the mud from its winter hibernation. Hey, you try to clear off dried NC clay with legs situated underneath your broad abdomen. Even attracting the attention of nature photographers may not be any help…
At the time of this particular night’s exploration, the pollen clouds from the hated longneedle pines was just starting; within two days it had exploded, so last night’s rain was a welcome factor in helping clear it away, though the season is far from over. The headlamp revealed my next subject because of the distinct reflection of the eyes, and it seems I have to do at least one of these every year, so here it is.
I have yet to determine how to identify the various wolf spider species in the area, and it may well take careful examination of undersides and hind leg segments and rot like that, which I wasn’t doing when sprawled in the (crackling) leaves going for the portrait, so we simply have the Lycosidae family right now. This is a female, a fairly good-sized one, so likely to produce an egg sac before too long – that is, if she isn’t discovered by the frogs inhabiting the backyard pond nearby. She was a little sluggish that evening, hiding under a leaf as I approached but then crouching cautiously as I removed it instead of seeking further shelter, so I was able to capture the pollen beginning to decorate her exoskeleton. Body length was probably about 30mm.
And I’m not going to close with the creepiest photos, so here’s some Carolina yellow jasmine (Gelsemium sempervirens) blooms found at the NC Botanical Garden this past Friday, their last day open to the public for the foreseeable future. The same visit produced a lot of other photos plus some video clips, so be patient – I’m working on it.
I had found the odd detail in the image that I’m about to show you some time back, and put it in the blog folder for the slow period, but so far hadn’t gotten to it. Now that it’s getting more springlike out there, I should be able to find current photo subjects, but it’s kinda grey at the moment, so we’ll go ahead and feature it – you know, to prove that my previous post was no joke.
Anyway, back in October of last year when I took these, I posted a frame very similar to this one, of a great egret (Ardea alba) perched in a tree.
This is full-frame with the long lens, but the egret was being fairly cooperative, making our cautious approach seem almost silly – better safe than sorry, however, and the slow stalking that we did shouldn’t ever be considered wasted effort. It was when I was examining the resulting photos at full resolution for critical sharpness that I saw the little detail, and realized how odd it looked:
I’ve got more than enough bird photos (not true – there’s never enough,) and don’t think I’ve ever seen an eye quite this displaced. Most birds have eyes on the sides of their head but a very narrow and tapered beak/face, so they have two kinds of vision: the split, both-sides-at-once kind that allows them to see a huge amount of their surroundings, and the two-eyes-focused-on-same-subject kind that permits depth perception directly in front so they can hunt accurately. To that end, the eyes do have some ability to swivel in their sockets, but typically, we see only the barest hint of it and mostly just find the pupil pretty much centered in the eye. Well, okay, it always is, but you know what I mean.
I see this and find it just looks wrong, a bit unhinged. I’ma have to ‘shop it back into place…
Just to let you know, this blog is a haven, a safe place as it were (as stupid as that concept is, and as much as I despise the whole culture of delicate flowers that we seem to be breeding,) where you will never hear any mention of the C-word. Either of them, actually. I’m beginning to suspect it is the last fucking site on the webbernets to be that way. The content here will remain as lame as it’s always been, devoid of current references to… you know… without any attempt to offer any reflections or memes or personal anecdotes that have already been done to death. Feel free to tell your friends.
Glad to be of help.
This week we have more contrasting images, beginning with this unidentified frog, almost certainly one of the varieties of cricket frog found around here, chilling (or more likely warming) at the edge of the water in a local park – I liked the myriad bubbles trapped in the algae and weeds that formed the water’s margin. This is the time of year we begin hearing the high-pitched creaks and beeps of the chorus frogs, sometimes called peepers, though they can be exceptionally hard to spot even when you know you’re right on top of them. Part of this is their tiny size, often less than 3cm in body length, part of this is their camouflage, and part of it is their habit of finding good hidey-holes among the vegetation and mud. I don’t recall the exact circumstances of this image, given that it was nine years ago and one of dozens that I shot on that foray, but it’s probable that I’d spooked it from the edge and this is where it paused after its jump into the ‘water.’
Not quite so nice three years later in 2014.
I had initially chosen a different frame, but then spotted the one above and liked the story more. This abstract tableau is one of the buds on my unexpected almond tree, one that had sprouted randomly within our compost pile and I transplanted into the yard. They don’t normally look like this of course, because usually the freezing rain storms occur well before the tree would ever bud out, and I was a little concerned that this would be responsible for stunting or outright killing off the tree. It proved much hardier than that, however, and has even survived multiple transplants, including the move to the new place. This year (meaning 2020,) it budded out early and is presently leafed out nicely – not fully, but certainly making a good show of it, as you can see from the frame to the left, taken yesterday.
And one more from that same ice storm in 2014, below, because it’s much fartsier – it was my original choice, from the bulbs that The Girlfriend’s Sprog had planted.
I have a small collection of photos from two recent outings to throw down here, slightly scattered – nothing exciting, but a fairly good impression of what I get up to at times. First off, I have to provide some as an illustration. Not quite a month ago, I posted about the enormous rise in water levels down at Jordan Lake, without a distinctive way of measuring just what they’d been. Last Thursday’s trip to the same lake provided a little more of an idea with a curious couple of details.
What you see here, spanning the frame from side to side, is a tree that had fallen among a few others, getting sandwiched between several standing trunks but still able to move freely when the water level rose. Its motion up and down, especially with wave action, left fresh signatures on the trunks of the standing trees flanking it.
That wasn’t enough for a good illustration, so I sent the Immeasurable Al Bugg over to pose alongside the damage as a standing ruler. He’s about my height, so 182cm or so, which places the upper reaches of the water at least three meters from the ground here, which was still above the waterline. Bear in mind that the trunk would have sat very low in the water, and the rubbing damage likely sits a little below the water’s peak level; in other places, there were indications that the water made it as high as four meters above normal. That’s a hell of a lot of water, especially since the lake is 26 km long.
These photos, by the way, were part of my lens tests, even though I had the 150-600 affixed on that trip far more often. You see, my carry-around lens – well, okay, that’s a misnomer, because I carry around at least four lenses at any given time, so let’s just say my generic ‘average’ lens, intended for a broad range of uses – was until recently the Canon 17-85 IS that I’d repaired, which is a fine lens and generally pretty good for my needs, except for being a little on the short side. Basically, I wanted a bit more focal length for versatility, and as I’ve said, I don’t buy new too often. With the tax return this year, I shopped around until I located a Canon 18-135 IS STM at a decent price, and that arrived in the middle of last week, so I got a couple of brief opportunities to test it out around the local pond when the weather was nice, previous to the lake outing.
There was another purpose in obtaining this lens, and that was my increasing forays into video, which is where the ‘STM’ part comes in. It refers to the autofocus motor, which is a new ‘stepper’ motor, very smooth and almost completely silent, so it is far less likely to intrude into the audio portions of any video recording I’m doing; this is helped by also using an external mic rather than the crappy internal one provided by the camera body. The Canon 18-135 comes highly recommended for both still and video, and is almost the exact same size as the 17-85 (before full extension, anyway.) Above, one of the lens tests at 135mm on a pair of Canada geese (Branta canadensis) in the nearby pond, full frame, while below is a full-resolution inset.
I honestly can’t complain about those kind of results.
I have yet to do any video tests of it, but those will come soon enough. While out, I had the opportunity to try out the ‘macro’ function, which will not get much use from me, mostly because I have the bestest macro lens in the whole wide world already (the Mamiya 80mm macro intended for the M645 series, adapted for use on Canon bodies,) but you know, in the interests of thoroughness…
A word about the ‘macro’ designation on the vast majority of lenses anymore: horseshit.
Okay, a few more words. ‘Macro’ doesn’t have any specific meaning to lens manufacturers, so they’re kind of free to interpret it as they like, and of course saying a lens can do macro work increases its value. In most cases, it only means the lens can focus within two meters, and may make as little magnification as 1:5, which isn’t terribly close. Dedicated macro lenses can usually do 1:1 magnification and are optimized for flat field work, meaning they can photograph a flat page or surface with consistent sharpness and little distortion right to the edges – this is mainly for copy work, which I have done only once or twice myself and am not really worried about, but that’s what makes dedicated macro lenses so expensive. And this lens will never get as close or as sharp as what I normally use, but for a casual attempt, it wasn’t too shabby to be honest. That’s the full-frame above, and a detail inset below.
Again, I’m not complaining, even though I have lenses that do better. If it’s not evident from the other details within the frame, the damselfly measured about 30-35mm in overall length.
Now, while I’ve done exercises such as only using one lens during a session, or even one focal length, I wasn’t that strict with myself while the conditions were so nice, and used the 100-300 L as needed, such as on the yellow-bellied slider below, one of countless turtles taking advantage of the pleasant temperatures.
I also got a collection of frames of a brown-headed nuthatch working on a nest hollow, this time with no female in evidence, but between the dim lighting where it was and its frenzied activity, those shots didn’t pass blog muster, especially when I got much better photos just a day later.
And finally, a slightly surprising find in a region of an overflow channel; the pond itself doesn’t have an adequate drain when we have heavy rains and it overflows its banks fairly frequently, so frequently that it has a serious channel cut across a meadow for the water flow, and portions of this retain water most of the time. Far too small to be considered ponds in themselves, they’re more like glorified puddles, but the amphibians like them.
I spotted the random loops of the egg strings first before realizing that the leaves in their midst weren’t, and sprawled on the banks for a better vantage. These are American toads (Anaxyrus americanus) and they’re busy producing those coils of polka-dots. Well, okay, the female produces them, the male fertilizes them as they appear – credit where it’s due. I had been thinking it was still a little early for this, but on checking last year’s posts I found that the major breeding session that I’d caught then had occurred just about a week later in the month. Curiously, The Girlfriend and I just did a weekend trip out to that same area with not a toad to be found, nor any eggs – all a matter of timing, I guess.
Right now I’m considering collecting a small handful of these to keep in an aquarium, in the hopes of photographing their emergence as tadpoles before I introduce them into the backyard pond; considering that the puddle here isn’t going through too much water turnover at the moment, there likely isn’t a lot I’d need to do to maintain favorable conditions until hatching at least. Hmmmm.
A lot of people have stories of this nature, and there’s a good chance you’re tired of hearing them, so I’ll try not to make it too long (yeah, this is me, so good luck with that,) but this is also distinctly me, and may give you an insight into the depths of my mind. Which you may regret. Seriously, best to just skip to the next post, or another website entirely.
About 24 years ago or so, I was scheduled to have my wisdom teeth removed, since three of them were doing that serious impacted bullshit, and this was going to be dental surgery for which they would have to knock me clean out. Mind you, this is the only time in my life I’ve ever been anesthetized other than a local, and my experience with local anesthetics previously was that they seemed to have less effect on me. So on the day of the surgery, lying back in the chair with the IV drip in, I realized that I was remaining perfectly lucid (or as lucid as I ever am, which is perhaps arguably less than perfect, but nominal, anyway.) This state remained as various people prepped, and I was about to bring it up to someone when the surgeon entered the room and introduced himself. As he went around behind my chair, he adjusted something back there with a faint rattle, and suddenly I felt a chill in the arm with the IV line. Ah! They’d only had a saline drip going until the surgeon opened the anesthesia valve. Okay then.
It was only a minute before my vision began to blur a bit, but more noticeably, the ceiling tiles (no I wasn’t counting them,) started to shimmy, sliding upwards a little before jerking back suddenly, over and over. I recall asking the surgeon if he knew why there was only a vertical component to the hallucination and not a horizontal one. He admitted that he did not know, but I was alert enough to recognize the amusement in his voice. That’s the last memory I have of consciousness.
Except for one bit. I knew wisdom teeth can be a pain in the ass, and often have to be fragmented to be removed, and I recall my head jerking sharply as they hammered on the chisel to break one of them up. There was no pain or discomfort involved, no distress at all, just the awareness of the action, and I thoughtfully put one hand up under my jaw on that side to help brace it. It was the same kind of thing where you wake enough to realize that your arm is asleep and shift to correct this before dozing off again. How much this move assisted them, I cannot say, but there was no reflection of this on the bill.
After the surgery, they encouraged me to just take it easy as the anesthetic wore off, and I was determined to speed this along, so I got out of the chair while no one was in the room and began walking around to burn it out of my system – such a thing likely doesn’t work, but it seemed like it should. There was music playing, and as a favored song came on, I’m reasonably certain I was dancing to it. Now, I don’t dance. Not ever, even when fully coherent. It probably wasn’t pretty.
I considered myself quite alert at the time, but looking back on it the following day, there are large portions of the post-surgery period that are simply blank, including whether I actually paid for the meds at the pharmacist on my way home (no I wasn’t driving – they insisted on that, for some reason.) I certainly must have paid, since I’m sure they never hand over the drugs until the payment is made and I did have them, but damn, someone on the ball could have probably bilked me into emptying my account.
Makes me wonder how hard it is to target e-mail towards people recovering from oral surgery…