Closer and closer, inexorably

November 6, 2020 Al Denelsbeck

“Inexorably.” I don’t use that word often enough…

Anyway, the autumn colors are advancing, day by day, and I spent just a little time over at the nearby pond to chase some of them. They’re still a bit patchy, and will likely remain that way, as the earlier trees turn and drop all of their leaves, then later trees do the same, and so on. Actually, I was on the interstate briefly today, and stretches of that had the best colors that I’ve seen anywhere, but I’m not going to make much of a scenic landscape shot from the interstate. Maybe something for a country & western album…

The Canada geese (Branta canadensis) had been fairly thin around the pond for a while, largely disappearing after a brood had been raised, but are back in large numbers now, likely some flocks on their migration south rather than semi-permanent residents. I have too many photos of Canadas, but they served here to add something to the varied colors. The American sweetgum trees (Liquidambar styraciflua) are probably the most dependable color producers in the immediate area, and should be peaking soon.

I don’t even know the species responsible for the next, but who’s asking anyway?

The blend of color worked well with the dark lines of the trunks, and I think I happened to be there at the right time for the backlighting to make the most of it. I know that, right down at the bottom, there are the ‘knees’ of a bald cypress that remains out of the frame, a tree that turns a really nice burnt-orange color at this time of year, but none of the ones near the pond provide a decent perspective. Maybe I have to poke around town and see if I can find any others, before they go bald.

I would be remiss if I did not feature The Girlfriend’s trumpet flowers.

Abruptly, at about the time we expected it to be going dormant, the trumpet flower tree (genus Brugmansia) burst forth with a load of buds, and they bloomed out over a period of several days right at the end of last month. They weathered the edges of yet another tropical storm that passed through (being pierced countless times by falling pine needles, another reason why I hate those trees,) and got browned a bit by overnight temperatures that dropped remarkably far for a few nights – and yet, there is another bunch of new buds as I type this.

I eventually moved the pot away from the pine, which also helped with backgrounds slightly, but there’s no really good shooting angle to keep distractions from the background, so I figured I might as well make the distractions pleasant – that’s The Girlfriend’s wind mobile back there.

Of course, another update on the green treefrogs (Hyla cinerea,) because why stop now?

With the lower temperatures, I figured these guys had all packed it in for the winter, finding someplace to bury themselves until spring, but this afternoon I found this half-size juvenile perched on the lemongrass plant (Cymbopogon) right by the front door, only a meter or so away from the spot on the Japanese maple where I’d found the sneaky one. Same one? Maybe, but not half as accomplished at hiding this time – probably actually wanted the attention. And I walked right into it – I’m such a tool sometimes.

Just so you know

November 5, 2020 Al Denelsbeck

A couple of years ago, I used this valuable space to opine about acting as (as in, pretending to be) an auto mechanic; now, I presently feel the need to express similar feelings about working on computers.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I work on computers all of the time, when you define it as, “engaging in tasks that are facilitated or necessitated by a computer,” and that doesn’t bother me in the slightest. This blog, of course, is almost entirely computer-driven, and so is the website itself. While the photography takes place outdoors and without any internet connection, it is inextricably linked to computers. And every job that I’ve held since, oh, 1991 has involved them in one form or another, usually to quite a large extent. No, I mean working on computers, the physical assembly and behind-the-scenes formatting that many people have performed for them by young people in blue polo shirts, the encompassing term of “fix my computer” – when, of course, they don’t simply buy a new one instead. I’ve never dealt with blue polos, and I don’t “fix” things by buying another – I just end up doing it myself.

The circumstance that provoked this particular rant is replacing a pair of harddrives in my workhorse, due not to any kind of failure, but dwindling space instead (see above about photography.) I picked up a pair some weeks back, and finally took the time to sit down and begin the surprisingly-long process of installing them. Actually, that bit isn’t long at all, even taking into account the formatting and partitioning. The long and troublesome bits are the prep work ahead of time, backing up existing drives and ensuring that unwanted and unneeded stuff has vacated, and then the transfer of all that info onto the new drives, accurately and completely. Add in that one of the drives was completely unrecognized initially, leading me to believe that it was corrupt, but that was because I examined it on a Windows computer which was incapable of interpreting the format; Linux’s GParted discovered it (and subsequently changed it) just ducky.

Notable in here is that I’m running a dual boot system, able to load both Linux (Mint) and Windows 10, unavoidably because there are still some things that I need Windows for. But this means that both systems must be preserved, and all harddrives must be usable by both – and that I needed to backup two systems. Did you know that, as a part of Windows backup services when it asks if you want to “create a disk image,” it means, “copy the entire fucking harddrive”? Yeah, I spent a few hours and frequent crashes finding that out.

More distinctly, somewhere in there Linux got some schmutz added into directories, dog knows how, which prevented me from altering any files since there “wasn’t enough space on the harddrive.” I knew exactly how much space was available (more than enough,) but for reasons yet to be determined, these programs supposedly needed space within the boot partition, which shouldn’t have been altered and definitely wasn’t necessary for saving a fucking thing. Did you know that, when LibreOffice (the Linux version of MS Office) cannot save a document, it leaves a temporary version of it sitting on your drive which perpetually prevents you from saving it even after you fixed the issue, until the goddamn fake copies are found and removed? Discovering these things takes time, and we won’t even talk about frustration.

[As an aside, while I find Linux overall to be much smoother and more stable than Windows, it is nowhere near ready to replace it, and in far too many cases it suffers from coder elitism, requiring lots of stupid text commands, a la ancient and decrepit MS-DOS, to perform simple functions that really should have been incorporated into the Graphical User Interface. What a lot of programmers don’t realize is that GUIs are not intended as sops to inept users, even when they often get used that way, but to prevent having to retype endless commands that could instead be activated with a fucking mouse click. I’m not viewing, sorting, or editing photos through a text interface, and really don’t want to keep opening one up every time there’s some trivial issue that probably shouldn’t have occurred in the first place.]

Anyway, I’m not actually done with this yet, and while this is all going on, I’m not engaging in other computer activities like writing posts or editing photos, which is simply asking for data losses. More will be along in a bit (Ha! Computer joke!), but for the time being it may be a little slow here. If you like, I’ll record audio of my efforts just to amuse anyone interested in creative cursing…

On this date 45

November 4, 2020November 4, 2020 Al Denelsbeck

Back in 2012, there were just two subjects that I shot on this date, but I shot a lot of frames of them, reason being, I was after the tiny details. One was the molted exoskeleton of some kind of grasshopper, and the other was this: a species of fruit fly (genus Drosophila) with curiously dark eyes. Typically they’re red or red-gold, but fruit flies are known for their visible mutations, especially in the eyes, which is one of the reasons they’re studied in genetics so much, and I was documenting this one because I wasn’t sure that I had a mutated specimen. Actually, genetic mutations occur fairly frequently in most species – humans are said to average between 60 and 100 per individual – but most don’t have any effect, and even less so visibly; there’s a lot of ‘junk’ DNA that no longer does anything, and mutations in that don’t either, for the most part.

Fruit flies are tiny, so holding one in position for photos takes more than tweezers, and what you see here is the tip of a wooden toothpick with a tiny blob of petroleum jelly on it, to which the fruit fly is adhering; yes, it’s tiny, and yes, it’s dead. Ah ha, you looked at a dead thing!

Moving on to the next year (that would be 2013.)

At the old place, a rental, we had two kinds of pampas grass in the yard, and they bloomed very differently in the fall. This one was fluffier, and I simply framed it against the richly-colored sky.

In fact, I’ve had this fartsy composition hanging around in the blog folder for years, thinking that I’ll put it up sometime, so now’s the time. This is the other kind, in fact shot two weeks and one day after the one above (so ineligible for an OTD post.) Yes, I used the cirrus clouds in the background that way on purpose, almost giving an impression of windblown seeds or trailing smoke. That’s creativity, that is.

I’ve got more space to use alongside this one, so I’ll digress. We no longer have the pampas grass, and I don’t exactly miss it. It didn’t look bad when fully grown, and provided enough photographic subjects, both by itself and by habitat for other things, but the maintenance was a bear. Each fall or winter it would have to be cut down to stubs, not particularly hard (any old saw would whip through it,) but the patches were thick, getting up to four meters in height, and the mass of vegetation to be hauled away measured three or four tarploads, dragged to the back and tossed over the fence into a mulch area. But pampas grass leaves are a bit serrated and sharp, so gloves and a heavy shirt or jacket were necessary. Then the stubs had to be burned off to promote the next year’s growth, and I know one year, I experimented and simply set fire to one of the patches of standing plants, throttling it back with a garden hose as needed. Easier, but just as time-consuming and a bit more dangerous. Overall, pampas grass isn’t worth the effort.

On to 2014.

I shot a lot of images on this day too, all during an outing to find fall colors, but really, not very many of them were compelling at all, and I may just go through and toss a lot of what I’d previously kept. The colors were weak – not because of the camera or anything, but because of the overcast lighting and the poor development of the autumn that year; usually that means a late summer/early fall drought. I did what I could, but this is about the limit of the palette available that day. Whoop de doo.

And that’s it, really – November 4th wasn’t too productive in my shooting history. Next week should be better – I’ve got six different years to work with.

Wait, we’re one short!

October 31, 2020 Al Denelsbeck

I had said earlier that, after an auspicious start, I thought I could do a post for every day of October, and had intended to post this one yesterday, so the month end abstract would bring us up to the full 31 posts this morning. Alas, the day at work yesterday was horrendous, running quite late, and I was exhausted and actually in pain when I got home late yesterday afternoon, so we simply grabbed something to eat at a deli and I crashed immediately afterward, waking up early this morning after the month’s-end had already posted. But you know what? It’s a blog, and I’ll get to it when I get to it, because that’s life, not to mention that I already maintain a pretty good schedule, and that the number of photos uploaded during October set a new record, which also holds true for the year (actually, blown it out of the water and shot remaining bits of it out of the air like skeet targets,) and with this post I get back into my schedule anyway. So I’m not going to feel guilty about it at all – I can own this like a man.

Funny, today is also a holiday (well, two, but who celebrates the other anymore?): it’s Get Unnecessarily Defensive Day, though that’s not really my style; it’s a holiday that celebrates and encourages insecurity, isn’t it? And if there’s one thing that I’m not, it’s insecure. Nonetheless, I put it out there in case anyone else, you know, wants to get annoying over trivialities. Not that I’m looking down on anyone – that’s not my style either. It’s just the way I was raised. Plus I’m a guy.

Getting back to the normal (well, regular) subject matter, we have the last photos (probably, anyway) from a recent outing to the Eno River, starting with the opening image of a distant red-bellied woodpecker (Melanerpes carolinus) that greeted us as we entered the walking trails. Metaphorically speaking, anyway – it really wasn’t paying us any attention.

One other woodpecker presented itself (again, metaphorically,) in typical conditions for the species, which can be described as “less than ideal.”

While downy woodpeckers (Dryobates pubescens) tend to be within better reach for photography, working on lower trunks often enough, they also avoid the sunlit portions and will even move to the opposite side once you start to get too close, so good angles still take some effort (and I’ve done better earlier in the month, so I’m not going to fret too much about these.) Then of course, there’s their movement, which is near-constant for the species, and a tripod or lens-stabilization does nothing at all for combating that. Sure, boost the ISO to get better shutter speeds, and watch the shadowy settings turn into pure noise.

Or you could always carry a pocketful of grubs and wood-boring beetles, and use those to lure the woodpeckers into better lighting conditions. Hey, don’t call yourself a dedicated nature photographer unless you’re willing to go the lengths. Just remember they’re there before you go digging for change at the convenience store…

We’ll do this in thematic chunks, and so next up is water.

This one was in the running for the month-end abstract, and I guess still made it. I was just doing the ripple patterns, and happened to catch some iridescence or refraction in there, not something that I noticed at the time, so whether this was an artifact of the moving water or a reflection of sundogs in the clouds, I can’t say. But you did notice the creepy little hand reaching in up there, right? Gotta recognize both holidays.

We stopped briefly alongside the spillway and chased a few compositions. For my part, I was playing around with shutter speed and seeing to what extent the lens stabilization (this is the Canon 18-135 STM) would compensate for handheld shots, since I hadn’t brought a tripod. At this point, it was early and the morning drizzle was just clearing, so light overcast conditions, which helped reduce the light and allow for longer shutter speeds, though this is still only 1/40 second, f16, ISO 250. Not enough for a really cottony look to the water, but in direct sunlight, even thinner sunlight, it’s very difficult to stretch the shutter speed long enough without, say, neutral density filters. For an experiment, I’m fine with it, but with a little preparation (e.g., the intention of doing such before I left home,) it could easily have been better. If it clears enough tonight (it’s mostly cloudy right now, early morning,) perhaps I’ll find some nearby ripples or cascades and do a moonlight attempt with the full moon.

Ah, wait, we have a stray fall color shot.

The branches seeming to favor the sunlit side meant the trunk itself could stand out distinctly, and I liked the suggestion of a lightning bolt against the reds (about the only tree to show this color yet,) so there we go. My effort, naturally, was to get underneath and frame it stretching diagonally to make the most of the shapes and color. Hopefully I can get some more just a wee bit later in the season.

But enough lollygagging. It’s time for the arthropods.

This unidentified grasshopper wasn’t moving at all, still chilly from the overnight temperatures, but was positioned to make the most of the emerging sun – provided a bird didn’t find it first. The grasshopper, I mean, not the sun. The sun usually isn’t too hard to locate; just look around in the sky until it hurts the most.

Very close by, an unidentified wolf spider (genus Lycosidae) was showing opposing animus by wandering enthusiastically through the weeds, not at all affected by the temperature (which at that time was somewhere around 15° C, I would say.) Spiders are very cold hardy, so it was probably balmy conditions to this guy, and it paused just long enough for a single frame before moving on.

We located two Carolina mantises (Stagmomantis carolina,) the later-developing of the two common mantid species in the area, and slightly surprising to me since I figured the season was about over for them.

This one was doing a really shitty job of blending in, like a teenage tourist, and was obviously about to produce an egg sac somewhere. Not on that leaf – they’re a little brighter than that. Or their instincts direct them to better supports – however you prefer to view it. While we can’t attribute to them a plethora of reasoning powers, they still get by just fine, and they’re not stupid enough to fret about politics or sporting events, so…

That was on the outbound leg, while on the return trip we spotted another, not too far from where the first was but I’m almost certain a different specimen.

This time, I went for the Mamiya macro, but was shooting wide open (f4) and so depth was extremely short. Not a recommended practice, because precise focus is very difficult and the short depth eliminates all other details, but occasionally it works; in this case at least, it delineated the dark edges of the head against the background. But yeah, it would have worked better with at least a little more depth.

I’m going to throw in a short video clip here, because I could see this effect while standing there and had to capture it.

Handheld, of course, with the Mamiya macro, and focus was just slightly off, but you can still see the interference effect as the breeze blew the web strands. I’m not exactly sure what caused this, and would have put it down to the patterns of the close web strands clashing with the patterns of the sensor pixels – except that it was visible to the naked eye, so I’m leaning towards the waves of light actually overlapping, but this is a wild guess and should not be used during exams; if you can explain this better, please jump in. Credit to the backlighting and having a dark trunk to highlight this against.

And finally, more recognition of the other holiday today.

This is a pumpkin spice spider, what they grind up to flavor all of those seasonal concoctions, so how this one escaped that fate, in a college town, I’ll never know.

Okay, I lie, it’s a marbled orb weaver (Araneus marmoreus) and common in the fall, plus not too small in size either – “marble” is close to an accurate comparison. This one was industriously spinning or fixing her web (the pedipalps indicate this is a female) before settling in to her hiding spot up at the topmost web anchor, possibly because we were so close; I had to step carefully through the bracken to reach this angle, and got just one useful image of her eyes. Which of course I’m sharing, because I’m me.

And that makes 31 posts for October, coming in before 6 AM too, so I’ve fulfilled my obligation and can now, um, dissolve into dust, or sail off into the sun~~set~~rise, or something. Whatever, I’m good. Happy Halloween!

Mom says you have to go now, October

October 31, 2020October 29, 2020 Al Denelsbeck

And take your abstracts with you.

We have a handful of abstracts this month, more luck than effort really, though I admit the first here was wholly intentional. I set my alarm to leave precisely when I needed to, to arrive on site just as the light was hitting the ideal saturation and exposure values, and timed the ripples of the lake to fall exactly where they needed to in the frame.

Man, that’s an ugly look you’re giving me – I was only kidding. But at least I knew when I took it that this frame would be in the running, and here we are. I doubt I have to tell anyone what we’re looking at, but as the twilight faded on Jordan Lake one evening, I shot the reflections in the lake ripples for some very soft, mildly streaky colors.

Let’s go starker. (No, not “starkers” – that’s Bri’ish slang for “nekkid.” I just mean “more stark.” Sheesh.)

On the most recent outing, one tree had the barest number of leaves still adhering to their branches, so I highlighted this denudement – actually, “starkers” is more appropriate than I thought. There were a few other thin branches intruding into the frame, but I cropped them out – just because you managed to get into my photo doesn’t mean I’m going to let you stay.

And the last is a two-parter, or at least, two versions of the same frame.

I also knew this one was in the running when I took it, but when you have sunrise light causing the dew to burst with sparkles, well, you do something about it. Shot wide open at f4 with the Mamiya 80mm macro, the out-of-focus dewdrops rendered as clean circles instead of the pentagons that any smaller aperture setting would have rendered; that’s one bad point about the Mamiya, because with only five aperture blades, the ghosts and bokeh do not render very nicely at all. I’m not sure why they did this, really.

But that’s not how the original looked. It looked like this:

The difference isn’t huge, but it’s noticeable: it’s those brilliant purple highlights from the bright spots in the frame, notably lower right and upper left. ‘Purple fringing’ is a common trait of digital sensors, and it can exist in film cameras too, but it’s more prevalent in digital because the sensors capture a range of violets that film often doesn’t. It’s a combination of this sensor sensitivity and chromatic aberration, which is trait of lenses themselves. Not all wavelengths of light get bent by the same amount as they’re focused through the lens, and in some cases this leads to color edging, especially on bright subjects against dark backgrounds. Many lenses were optimized to correct this, especially apochromatic lenses, but the Mamiya is not one of those.

It’s easy to fix in post-production, however. In this case, all I did was completely desaturate the magenta registers, and the only place this showed was in the fringing – nothing else in the photo really had any noticeable magenta in it at all. At other times this might be more detrimental to the colors of an image, but a little effort in selecting a narrow range of the affected color, before then desaturating, will solve that problem.

October’s advance guard

October 29, 2020 Al Denelsbeck

In central NC, the fall colors don’t really develop distinctly until November, though some trees can be found changing quite early, and if you frame for those, you can make some nice compositions even when a broader landscape shot would be unimpressive. That was the primary activity of an outing this past Monday, though there were a handful of other subjects to be had, too – just a handful. Right now, we’re doing the earlier autumn stuff.

I have to note that, in the late spring, The Girlfriend found a thin-leaved Japanese maple on sale at a local place and got it for the yard, but at present it’s still in a pot. I have no idea of the name/subspecies, but we found that come fall, it turns really colorful. It was far too small and with too thin a canopy yet to do wider shots, so I stuck to featuring little spots, but it’s enough to show the color change.

I also have to note that this display is pretty brief – less than a week, before the leaves turned completely brown, withered, and dropped off, so we’ll have to see if next year, after we’ve transplanted it into the yard and it gets some serious growth on it, I can do a bit more with it in its narrow peak period.

But it looks good backlit too.

One of the things I teach about is attention blindness, the common trait of seeing just a particular subject that you’re focused upon and not the remainder of the frame: the background, the foreground, the sides, and so on. As a species, it’s the way we deal with distractions, but when it comes to photos, those distractions can take away from the impact of the main subject, and it takes a little practice to force awareness. In this case, the aspect of the background was so broad and defocused that it didn’t attract my attention, even while editing, and I only noticed it when seeing the thumbnail in my folders while prepping this post.

Seen at this size, the window frame becomes a bit more apparent, as is the angle that I took to frame the leaves, but it’s so subtle in the larger versions that I’m not worrying about it at all; I just wanted to show what appears sometimes when you can ‘step back’ from the bigger picture. Be aware, however, that repeating patterns like brickwork and fences and so on will almost always be apparent in the final image, no matter how out of focus you try to render them, and even perfectly straight lines can jump out as being too unnatural.

I really should save this next one, but I figure I’ll get a better version later on, maybe with snow.

The subject and color mix seems more expressive of the period between Thanksgiving and christmas, to me at least, though by that time the background colors would be gone. In the real world, I mean – I think they’re fixed in the photo now. And naturally, this perspective is American, since not a lot of other countries celebrate Thanksgiving, so the mood is lost on everyone else. The berries, on a lot of bush species, have really kicked it in this year, so I have a few subjects to chase if/when we get some snow or ice storms in the winter. As I type this we have rain, still with decent temperatures, but this is too far away to go attempt in these conditions, especially with little else that would work out there (‘out there’ being West Point on the Eno, which of course is known the world over. Actually, I suspect a certain percentage of people in the same town don’t even know the place…)

Best, or at least the most vivid, for last of course.

I think this is some species of (wild) maple, but I could be wrong. Either way, the colors really popped with the backlighting, helped by the direct light missing from the same-colored background leaves. Such things tend to be sporadic and take specific view angles to exploit, which is kind of necessary right now at least until more trees turn, but you do what you can do. Look around a lot, try to spot the patches of brilliant color, and pick the perspective that accentuates them the most.

Or not. I’m not your daddy – probably not, anyway – so you don’t have to listen to me…

On this date 44

October 28, 2020October 27, 2020 Al Denelsbeck

Three weeks ago, I speculated that the choices for the On This Date posts were getting thinner because the shooting season slows down in the fall and winter, which is true – but not damn yet. I shot a lot on October 28th for various years.

You scoff? We start with 2012, as the end of the world loomed.

This is the first of the bug-n-purple pics for today, an unidentified crab spider that spent a lot of time casting webbing into the wind. Whether this was for creating new anchor/wandering lines, or an attempt to balloon to a new location, or simply from homemade chili the previous night, I cannot say and neither did it. This is a difficult thing to capture in camera because the light has to hit the web strand just right to show it, and focus gets short at this magnification, but I was valiantly making the attempt this day anyway (judging from the large number of photos in the folders, and those were the ones that I kept.)

With the end of the world postponed indefinitely, in 2014 I was down at a nearby pond (no, a different one) watching a bumble bee or carpenter bee partaking of a pickerelweed (Pontederia) flower, as seen by its shadow on a leaf of the very same plant. How this has not taken first place in countless art shows, I’ll never know (though not entering any is probably a contributing factor. Among others.)

In 2015, I had a magnolia green jumping spider (Lyssomanes viridis) on hand and was photographing the curiously visible retinas as they moved independently within the cephalothorax, thus the odd effects in the eyes. If you want to see video of this (and of course you do,) go here. It’s really damn cool.

Continuing the bug-n-purple theme, in 2016 I was photographing an unidentified insect, what I initially took to be a hoverfly but now suspect is a syrphid fly (possibly Spilomyia longicornis – note the alternating breaks in the abdominal banding) on an aster bloom, and caught a frame just as it flew off. Getting decent photos of insects in midair is far too stress-inducing for someone my age, but I’ll take them when they happen serendipitously. Is that a word?

And finally, closing out the theme in 2017.

I don’t know the exact species of these hoverflies, or even of the pond lily, but I’m happy to take the opportunity to hurt your eyes and be thematic at the same time. A variation of this same kind of flower, in different light, can be seen here, and did make it into my gallery showing just over a year later, but it wasn’t the kind of thing where you get awards, which is good, because I would have made everyone else participating feel bad, and I’m nicer than that. Barely.

Some more experiments

October 27, 2020 Al Denelsbeck

During an outing yesterday, Buggato asked if I was going to chase any moon shots in the next few nights, and I shrugged and said, “Maybe.” I had some experiments to try, but the past several nights the humidity and haze were affecting things too much.

Going out after 11 PM, however, I saw the moon was showing as deep contrast as I’ve ever seen, evidence of a good clear night, so I said What the hell? and got out the tripod. One of the experiments was trying out the Tokina 2x teleconverter with the newer Tamron 150-600mm lens. A teleconverter is essentially a magnifier that goes between camera and lens, and will magnify the image by the specified amount while reducing the light by largely the same amount, so in this case, two stops darker. This is one of the problems with teleconverters, in that they not only eradicate any chance of autofocus in most cases because of this darkening, but they also reduce the light which increases the shutter speed and thus the opportunities for camera shake. To say nothing of the quality, which is often not optimal.

I’d obtained this one close to twenty years ago (certainly not one of the top-of-the-line models because those are ridiculously expensive,) and used it here and there, but it’s strictly tripod work, and with the old Sigma 170-500 lens the results were sporadic, to say the least – in most cases I was better off without it, especially for astrophotography. But it was worth a shot.

So below, the lens as-is, no converter, and you can see how distinct the contrast was last night.

I take quite a few images of subjects like the moon, as I’ve said before, because precise focus is very hard to obtain, so it was pleasing to have the first frames bang on.

By the way, firmly-fixed tripod, mirror lock-up with at least a two-second delay, and a remote release were all used here. 1/160 second, f9 at ISO 250.

Now for the teleconverter test.

This time, the exposure was 1/40 second, f8 at ISO 250, which accounted for the light loss through the teleconverter nicely. And I’ll be damned if the resolution isn’t kicking it here, too; the initial views during editing had me pretty fired up. But of course, both of these are reduced for blog display and nowhere near full resolution, so let’s see those, side by side.

The comparison here really is between the quality of the teleconverter and simply upsampling the original image without a teleconverter to see if it’s actually worth it. As you can see, the quality is damn near identical, even though the upper image is the original that has been expanded to twice its original size to compare directly. Actually, not quite twice, but a 91% increase rather than the promised 100% (2x,) but that’s a trivial quibble. There’s a faint greenish color cast from the converter in the bottom image, nothing to worry about, and a little loss of contrast, but again, not enough to cause me to tear my (remaining) hair out.

So if the quality is the same if I simply upsample the original in an editing program, why not just stick to that? And for astrophotography and various other uses, this may be just fine, but sometimes the image depends on what’s captured in the frame, and this especially holds true for video – cropping video footage is usually more hassle than it’s worth. But video is also rendered in lower resolution than still photos, so the teleconverter could probably produce even crappier results and still not be too noticeable. And so, while out there for a few minutes, I shot a brief video clip intended only to show how much the moon was moving (or the Earth was turning – you know, pedantism) in that time. The teleconverter made this much more distinct.

I saw the speck cross the frame while watching the LCD on the back of the camera and was pretty excited, let me tell you. Weeks earlier I’d seen much the same thing before I could trip the shutter, and figured I’d missed a satellite passing in front of the moon because, by my reasoning, for a bird to appear that small it would be moving much slower across the face. We now see I was playing Silly Buggers, because it clearly crosses quite quickly even when rendered as little more than a speck. And of course, were these birds, or bats? Not too many birds are out at night, but there are some, among them owls and nighthawks naturally; I can rule out the former I think, from the flight and flapping patterns, but not the latter. To be sure, I’d have to catch some closer to the camera for more detail. So it remains to be seen if I’m ever going to burn up the memory card in further attempts at this, but hey, three in one minute is encouraging at least.

Also illustrated rather handily with that clip is how much minor vibrations are magnified with telephoto lenses. At the beginning and end of the clip, all I did was reach up to the camera and press the button on the back to start/stop the video, and I wasn’t being heavy-handed. Seeing how long it takes for that to die down is convincing enough to use mirror lock-up and a nice delay, to eradicate the vibration from the mirror at least. Unfortunately, the corded remote release does not activate the video, but the infra-red one will, so, next time.

Just… one, really

October 26, 2020 Al Denelsbeck

I have a handful of photos from an outing today, but I’m winding down and still have other things to get done tonight, so this is a quick one that’s been sitting in the blog folder. Stay with me, it gets much more exciting.

Okay, no it doesn’t. But stay with me anyway.

When I’m sorting through recent photos to see what to keep and what to discard, right before shifting them into appropriate categories, I usually look at the images at full resolution to see if the sharpness is adequate. Some months back I began using a Canon 7D, and the jump in resolution was noticeable (and don’t ask me what it actually is, because I don’t know – that’s not the kind of thing that I worry about.) With earlier bodies, I could still see most of the subject when I did this, just filling the monitor screen, but now I see just a small portion – and I’m even using a much bigger monitor now. [Note that this is still far from being those desktop rigs that you see where someone has three two-meter wide monitors spread across their desk – I only have one, and it has about a 50cm active display width, but this does mean that I have some room to move the various editing menus aside and see more of the photo that I’m working on.]

There is probably a small degree that this resolution is detrimental, because I might reject an image as ‘not quite sharp enough’ when it has more than enough to print at a decent size – I’m just examining it too closely, and this especially holds true for images that will display full-frame, uncropped and not dependent on detail, like many scenics. However, maintaining sharpness even at high magnification, full resolution, means that I can crop the image, significantly sometimes, and not suffer from pixelation or ‘grain’ issues.

And as I’m doing this close examination, every once in a while one jumps out at me, such as the great egret (Ardea alba) above. That’s the entire frame up there, taken with the Tamron 150-600mm at 450mm while the bird was being cooperative; a lot of the images of the session lacked sharpness, suffering from inexact focus or motion blur, or both. But this one held up pretty well when seen at full resolution, which is shown below.

Yeah, that passes muster.

Just a couple

October 25, 2020 Al Denelsbeck

A few days back, I got the chance to do a brief walk around the nearby pond to see what could be found, and the answer was, not much. The great egret that provided so many close opportunities was nowhere to be seen, quite likely having moved on now. Instead, I was seeing a great blue heron (Ardea herodias) that’s been around for a few weeks now. The heron was the polar opposite of the egret: it wouldn’t let me get within a dozen meters, which is pretty timid for the species, so everything that I shot was from a distance, allowing only for semi-fartistic frames.

In fact, while attempting to stalk it, I completely forgot about the downy woodpecker (Dryobates pubescens) and its potential nest hollow in one location, remembering it long after passing and chiding myself for it. I was toying with the idea of turning back but decided against it – and as it turns out, didn’t need to. A few minutes later, the same sounds of industrious excavation came to me, and another downy (if not the same one) could be seen digging away on a lower branch directly over my path. Okay then.

I was in shadow and the woodpecker was being as hyperactive as normal, so image blur was a serious issue, and I trashed a lot of frames trying for something sharp, but managed a couple. And at some point, I’m going to have to go back and attempt video to try and see something. Many of the tree-clinging birds like woodpeckers and nuthatches can scoot along easily on the vertical trunks and undersides of limbs, as seen here, and move around with what appears to be little hops that seem perfectly natural. Except… gravity doesn’t work that way, and any bird that ‘hops’ while hanging upside-down isn’t exactly going to come back to the branch. So I’m curious to see what exactly they are doing. I first started wondering about this decades ago while still in NY, when I watched a nuthatch sitting sideways on the post that held our bird feeder, and abruptly it reversed the direction that it was facing – again, with just a little hop, except it couldn’t have been. I’m finally at a point now where I can shoot video of such a maneuver, up close, and slow it down enough to see what’s actually happening – provided, of course, that the light is sufficient for a decent frame rate and I get another bird to cooperate. We’ll see what happens.

Meanwhile, I decided to take the above frame, tinted blue by the shadows (and a white balance set for sunlight,) and tweak it more towards a neutral color register.

Just so you know, this is a small reduction in the blue channel, and an even smaller increase in the red – just enough to compensate for the color cast. Or at least, to my eye. Most editing programs contain some function to try and do this, but they’re easily fooled by what appears in the image, such as the blue sky or too much green foliage, so I almost always get better results doing it by hand. It usually takes a little practice in recognizing what true neutral is, and I won’t say I have it perfect here, but it’s close enough for free content ;-)

And one more.

The downy was fairly engrossed in its work, so I could slowly slip in directly underneath it, in a position to get pelted with the wood pulp it was discarding; I was hoping to catch some of this in the photo as it fell, but no frames show it distinctly (or at least, none that showed the woodpecker sharply as well.) The woodpecker was merely facing the opposite of those frames above, but I was aimed straight up now. I like how the widely spread toes even peek out from the sides of the body.

That’s all for now, but I’m keeping on schedule for the end of the month – only six more posts to go, and two of them are part of my routine schedule, plus I have an outing tomorrow. Piece of cake.

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