Storytime 52

Al Denelsbeck

holly leaves against rising sun
Just to let you know, this is actually being written at the beginning of November, because that’s when I cemented the idea. Not all posts have that much lead time – far from it – but occasionally, I have a concept that works better (for me anyway) to postpone a bit. Mostly because this image above was taken exactly seven years ago on this date, and featured then.

But there’s slightly more to it than that. My photos are sorted into categories, and this one was in the Sunrise/Sunset folder, which was very sparsely populated at the time: a mere 52 images resided therein, the first being from Florida back in 2004. In eight years of digital images and opportunities, I only had four dozen pics from sunrise or sunset, which was disturbing to me at least, especially since when I get the right conditions, I’ll fire off a selection of frames over a period of several minutes as the colors change. And while I had a pretty good collection of photos on slide film sitting in the cabinet, the digital folders were notably barren.

Things change. Since then, we moved to a new location, with a pond nearby. And we took several beach trips, where I often made the effort to be out at sunrise. So to illustrate, I tell you that at present, the folder contains 2507 images [I have left myself a popup reminder to ensure that this number is correct right before it posts, thinking that I may have added to it – as of this writing in early November, the number was 2,474.] [Edit early AM 12/27: On top of that, I snagged more than a handful from a student outing yesterday evening, and had to sort through those to get the count correct this morning ;-)] That’s a bit more like it, especially since in there now lives my green flash photos, and some of the prints that were featured in my gallery show.

Anyway, I had to take advantage of the idea that the last Storytime post of the year would fall on the anniversary of first posting the image above – that’s the kind of elaborate planning that you’ve come to expect from me. Annnddd this is also the 11th anniversary of the first blog post, too. Well, my first blog post – there are ugly rumors that others began ‘web logging’ before me, but no one so far has documented such to my satisfaction.

[Also of note, at least to someone I suppose: That first blog post was also the only, so far, use of the word “bonhomie” within these pages. It’s not like I looked it up to sound erudite for the first, or that I stopped using the word since then for ethical reasons; there just wasn’t any particular opportunity where it seemed to fit at any later time. I mean, it’s not like it’s a common word anyway…]

A little winter activity, part 1

Al Denelsbeck

Great blure heron Ardea herodias perched by dead tree
Okay, technically, these are all fall photos, because they were taken before December 21, and because we’ve really only had a couple of overnight frosts while still having days with decent temperatures, but it looks like North Carolina winter around here, and the critters are largely behaving as if it is, so it counts within the realm of nature photography, okay?

Anyway, getting a few more images in while I have some time to write. These were all taken during two outings not too long back, while I have another that’s going to sneak in before the end of the year. I think. I mean, I’ve already done the outing, so I’m referring to getting the post done in that time frame.

Above, while doing some lens tests out on Jordan Lake, I fired off a couple of shots at a distant great blue heron (Ardea herodias.) The banner-style crop comes from the bare fact that there was a boat ramp not far behind that didn’t add anything to the composition. There really was only one position that I was able to shoot from since I didn’t have either a boat or a long ladder tucked in the bag somewhere (I know, right?) so this is what we have. I’ll try to do better next time.

But you can’t complain about the next shot, a lovely underside portrait of a black vulture (Coragyps atratus) peering down at me from its perch while it waited for some decaying opportunity.

perched black vulture Coragyps atratus seen from below
Well, sure, maybe you can complain, given the subject matter, the odd angle, the muted color, the twig in the way, the lack of other detail, and my unnecessary reminder of their diet, but seriously, look at that eye! Check out those lovely head caruncles! Look up the word, “caruncle!”

Moving on.

On a later outing with the Immoderate Al Bugg, we had some warm weather to contend with but managed to cope, because that’s how hardcore we are. I was still surprised to find some turtles out basking – the temperature was conducive at the moment, but usually they’ve buried themselves in the mud by this point because I’m sure the water temperature was holding somewhere below 10°c.

painted turtle Chrysemys picta basking alongside reflection in channel
Mr Bugg says he also shot the reflection, but this was taken 11 days ago and he’s had his chance, so…

But what I was surprised to capture was such a distinctive catchlight in the eye, because the turtle was in scattered indirect light within a patchy canopy. Then again, the trees are largely bare, so maybe not so surprising? Perhaps I was just lucky enough to get the turtle with its head raised enough. Here’s a full-res detail shot anyway.

basking painted turtle Chrysemys picta with catchlights and possible leech
… with a bonus capture of what might well be a leech, curled up on its cheek – turtles are favored targets of leeches.

Caruncles!

Fine – we’ll go cuter for a second, even if it’s a common-as-muck squirrel.

eastern grey squirrel Sciurus carolinensis posed fetchingly
Considering that this was the species of wildlife that we got the closest to and it was cooperating pretty well, I fired off a few frames. Not to mention that it says, “autumn” pretty well overall, even if this is a winter post. We can all thank Tamron’s Vibration Control for the sharpness of this in the muted light, 600mm at 1/100 second.

Nearby, the largest hornet’s nest that I’ve ever seen decorated a tree. I made it a point not to make a lot of noise in approaching and didn’t disturb the tree, but was later informed that such nests are only seasonal and it was almost certainly unoccupied. Which is a shame, because I would have returned in the spring for some action shots (no, not me running screaming from an angry swarm.)

large hornets' nest on tree
There was no way that I could include anything at all for scale, being two meters over my head, but I can tell you this was over a half-meter in length if it was an inch.

[Sorry, obscure reference here; an inch is an archaic unit of measurement only recognized by two incredibly backwards countries, roughly equal to 2.5cm.]

And while some of the birds still in the region were taking advantage of the warmer weather, they were also being remarkably secretive, and few posed for any kind of nice portraits. One eastern towhee (Pipilo erythrophthalmus) was slightly cooperative for the species, making a brief appearance in the open (kinda) while still shrouded in the gloom that had fallen as the sun dove into deep haze, and of course it posed against the sky.

eastern towhee Pipilo erythrophthalmus against hazy sky
I remarked earlier about zoology abandoning the name rufous-sided towhee for eastern towhee, personally liking the color reference better, but it appears that it was a taxonomical decision because the rufous name was found to be used by two different species. Yet instead of simply adding a new name for one of the species, they changed both, and for the boring too; this one is an eastern towhee, while the other is a spotted towhee. Sheesh.

However, knowing how the light was, I decided to fire off the dinky little on-camera flash, not for primary illumination, but for fill lighting to make the colors come out a little better.

eastern towhee Pipilo erythrophthalmus with fill-flash
inset of eastern towhee Pipilo erythrophthalmus showing catchlightNot a huge impact, mostly from the distance involved, but a slight edge – really, there isn’t a lot you can do with such conditions, and had I brought a proper flash unit, it still would’ve taken some careful exposure balancing to prevent the background sky from rendering too dark, and I doubt the towhee would’ve waited around for the shenanigans. But I’m including an inset of the same frame, just for the effect on the eye again – this time artificial instead of natural like the turtle’s. And it added a small defining sheen to the beak too. Still not a great photo of course, but a small demonstration of supplemental lighting – which also lit up the stubborn leaf right at the bird’s ass. At the same time, direct light is boring and can make your subject seem flat, so some degree of sidelighting works a lot better, and doing that with an external flash unit starts to involve some more elaborate prep, like light stands and flash triggers, or at the bare minimum an assistant holding the flash out on a coiled shoe cord. Again, not a spontaneous thing.

So no, not a hugely productive couple of outings, but as I said, it’s winter – there isn’t a lot to work with right now. As I said, some more will be along. Soonish.

Even more rampant

Al Denelsbeck

It is very early christmas morning as I type this. All the presents are wrapped, the cheesecake is cooling on the stove top, and the kitchen is clean with the dishwasher going. And I have left a couple of gifts for The Girlfriend to discover when she gets up, one of which I’m going to show here because I’m almost positive she’s going to hit the kitchen before she checks my blog for updates. As strange as that may sound.

soap dispenser with hand-painted sea turtleAnd I admit, this is strictly my ego talking – I mean, even more than usual – but I’m pleased with this one. As long as you don’t look too closely.

Here’s the story (before Friday, even): several years back I painted a sea turtle onto a soap dispenser for the kitchen, which she was pleased with. Me, less so; I felt I could have done it better, but as long as she was happy, I could deal. At the time, however, the only clear dispenser that I could find was acrylic, with a plastic pump, not really what I was after (you know, when you make something personalized and much less disposable than normal, you want a little longevity from it.) Over time the pump got worn, and eventually the acrylic body cracked. I had more time this time, and looked around to find a glass dispenser in pale blue; you know, more-or-less water colored. The pump was unfortunately still plastic – I’m liable to have to look hard to overcome that, but for now, here we are. This was long enough ago that I’m almost certain that she’s forgotten about it.

This time, I’m more pleased with the painting, which measures all of 48mm in width, and because of that size, it looks a bit rough when I apply the serious macro techniques on it and I’m not showing you those pics. I’m consoling myself with the assurance that most paintings from, you know, qualified (meaning paid) artists would look rough at that magnification – some even without it. You’re seeing it here at roughly ‘typical’ distance and perspective, so you can judge for yourself if it works or not. Doesn’t matter, really; as long as she likes it, you guys can go squat.

It’s sitting in position now behind the sink, and I’m liable to not even be present when she discovers it, but that’s part of the fun. Plus it was one less gift that had to be wrapped ;-)

Happy holidays, everyone!

Not the holiday you plan for

Al Denelsbeck

That just ruins it.

Today is, apparently, Get Awakened Twice Before The Alarm Goes Off Day, that rather unwelcome holiday that planning for, or even alerting anyone to ahead of time, defeats the purpose, which is why I couldn’t tell you about it sooner, and in fact didn’t remember myself. Anyway, here it is, and I figured I’d use some of my extra time with posting about it.

The first occasion came courtesy of The Monster, who decided that somewhere in the wee dark hours, it was time to repeatedly dance across the bed, knock my glasses off the nightstand, and generally be far too kittenish for her age (shooting ugly looks in her direction.) This managed to get me awake enough to be annoyed, but not annoyed enough to stick, as it were, and I eventually fell back asleep.

An unknown time later but still better than 90 minutes before I was due to wake up, The Girlfriend got me up by telling me the neighbor’s yard waste fire from yesterday had reignited and was pretty high – they sit out back across the creek, better than a hundred meters off and so, to be visible, it was serious enough. We could see it wasn’t near the house, but also that no one was monitoring it, and so we traipsed over there in the frosty, still-dark air to get them up too. With luck, it was the second time for them, but I didn’t bother to ask. No damage, no immediate risk, but they appreciated being alerted to the hazard.

On an entirely incidental note, this is the winter solstice, or perhaps we should say the December solstice because it’s only a winter solstice for the northern hemisphere, meaning that the days have stopped getting shorter and are now lengthening again. In the northern hemisphere. In the southern hemisphere, where it is largely summer, the days have stopped getting longer and are now going to get shorter for six months. On the equator, meanwhile, nobody gives a damn. Plus, we can only count this days longer/shorter horseshit if you consider “day” to mean “daylight hours” and not the 24-ish hour sidereal day or like that, which remains the same length of time throughout the year and will only start to get longer/shorter if the Earth changes its rate of spin. Seriously, who created this system? It’s nuts.

But while we’re on the subject of celebrating-only-not-really,-maybe-kinda-observing-in-the-loosest-sense-of-the-word, I must note that this is the 1700th post on the ol’ Walkabout blogaroonie, 1700 being significant in that it, um, marks the dividing line between, you know, things. The remarkable difference between pre-1700 and post-1700. I shouldn’t have to explain this.

So in recognition of this, I present the 1700th image taken with the Sony F-717 digital camera, temporarily loaned to me while I lived in Florida – an odd milestone, perhaps, but it’s the first number that I could actually track, everything up until then (and plenty since) being shot on film and thus lacking any solid numbering system. So here’s a (probable) thinstripe hermit crab (Clibanarius vittatus,) residing for a short while in my saltwater aquarium and staring deep into our eyes in that mesmerizing way that crabs have. The crushed shell substrate at bottom gives a hint of scale, but my subject here wasn’t any greater than 20mm across the widest points of its adopted shell.

probable thinstripe hermit crab Clibanarius vittatus in small aquarium
So, regardless of which of these you’re celebrating, happy holidays, and don’t get too carried away!

And out the other side

Al Denelsbeck

I had originally lined these images up for a post several weeks back, but that was at the time that Mr Bugg was doing his own monochrome posts and was being snarky, and I wasn’t going to give him any satisfaction in that regard, but now that I just did something about ultra-violet light, I figured I could go to the opposite side of the visible spectrum and do infra-red now.

I had my fun with IR photography in the past, but haven’t done anything recently, and that’s because I had a camera at the time that could do it easily – the Canon Pro 90 IS – but none of my current cameras can tackle it because they all have IR blocking filters over the sensor. Now, I still have the Pro 90 buried away and could presumably use it again, but the last time I tried it refused to power on; this might only have been the battery, I don’t know. All that aside, right now we’re dealing with shots from back in the day, a little after hydrogen had formed I think.

Old Well on UNC Chapel Hill Campus in infra-red
Believe it or else not, this is a full-color image, the barest hint of which can be seen right along the bottom. This is the original frame produced by the Pro 90 and a simple Lee 87P3 IR pass polyester filter; that booginess at the bottom is the edge of the filter, where I’d mounted it to a wire frame for easier handling, getting into the shot. Different filters pass different wavelengths and often produced distinctive color casts, but this one was almost monochromatic. That faint lavender hue served no purpose for me, so I simply converted the image into greyscale anyway, but the dynamic range was also a bit narrow, and the photo begs for more contrast. So a little more editing was in order.

original image showing edits in Curves function
The little graph in there is the histogram within the ‘Curves’ function in most serious photo editing programs, and when you look at the mountain range in that graph, you’ll notice that there aren’t even any foothills over at either side – this means that nothing in the original image actually becomes fully black (left side) or fully white (right.) Can’t have that – we want a full range. So the curve itself is adjusted by moving the corner points, upper right and lower left, inwards until they’re just outside of the mountain. What this does is take the brightest parts of the original frame, somewhere around medium light grey, and bring them all the way up to white, and the same in reverse for the darkest portions. Even though, in the way this is illustrated by the graph, it seems like we’re cutting something off, this was all unused brightness registers, and it works better to think that we’re stretching the brightness of the entire image out to the limits; the brightest part of the image, originally medium light grey, has been boosted to almost-white by doing this, and vice-versa.

Then there’s the curvy bit between those pointers. Instead of a nice diagonal line, I dragged it higher along the right side and lower along the left, which increases contrast within the existing range. If the curve were shaped the opposite way, it would reduce contrast. In this manner, I made the domed structure (this is Old Well on the Chapel Hill Campus of the University of North Carolina) remain stark and bright while brightening the leaves of the trees as well – not as much, because Old Well needs to stand out, but the surreal nature of their brightness needed to be enhanced. At the same time, I darkened down the lower registers, making the branches more distinct against the leaves and also darkening that sky. By the way, this was shot on a bright September day and the sky was brilliant blue – this is just what infra-red does to blue skies and foliage. I now wish that I’d done a frame without the IR filter so you could compare what it looked like in visible light, but it didn’t occur to me at the time (I hadn’t started blogging yet.)

So let’s see the end result in better detail:

Old Well in infra-red, tweaked for improved contrast
With a slight difference in the middle of the curve, I could have made the leaves brighter, but I didn’t want them to appear like snow, and still wanted Old well to dominate the frame, so this is my choice – others may have approached if differently. I’m very pleased with the branches standing out so well, because in visible light they almost entirely blended in with the leaves. This altered image was part of my gallery show at this time last year, as well as being donated to a charity auction many years previously where it sold for more than what I’d valued it as, so at least one other person approved.

Storytime 51

Al Denelsbeck

Confession time: I started this back in the spring, and attempted to follow through, but timing and conditions did not mesh well. I include it here as a long Storytime post, partially because I already have the last one of the year written, but also just to clear it out of the queue. The previous draft of this post was last saved April 4th of this year, to give you the timeframe. So below, the post as it originally read.

*     *     *     *

This is kind of a diary, of sorts. I heard about something really cool that it seemed possible that I could get images of, and have been wanting to try for a while now. Blogwise, I’d like to wait until I’m actually successful, because I’ve mentioned projects and goals that were “in progress” and too often they simply never came about, leaving this teaser out there (for, you know, all those people who were waiting desperately for it to come to fruition.) So now I typically wait until I actually achieve what I’m after, but this is both misleading (in that it may seem like I never struggle, or that it took no time at all,) and stands the chance of missing out on some details along the way. So, I’m chronicling this kind of as I go, adding as I get more results, and if you’re reading this it means I actually got somewhere. Spoiler alert.

There was a scientific paper published not too long ago that revealed that the fur of southern flying squirrels (Glaucomys volans) fluoresces under ultra-violet light – like, bright pink. There are numerous questions that arise, among them a) how did it take this long to discover this, and b) what possible purpose does this serve? I am not going to answer any of these, but there stands the chance that I can get images of it, because at the time that I heard of it, I was pretty certain I had one of them overwintering in one of our bluebird boxes. Since hearing of this, I determined that two of the bluebird boxes were likely so occupied. I had all winter to plot, because flying squirrels hibernate and would not become active until warmer weather.

The first thing I did was look for a better UV light source. I possessed two at the time that I first heard this finding: one little dedicated flashlight that took three AAA batteries, and my powerful headlamp had a blue light option that also extended into UV range, as I could tell from the items that fluoresced under its beam. So, here I insert a word about fluorescence, which basically means, something that absorbs light and re-emits it, often at a different wavelength. For instance, most highlighting pens are actually UV fluorescent, which is what gives them their slightly unreal glow, and there are a few minerals that are naturally fluorescent, plus plenty of artificial items like high-visibility orange or green vests that road workers wear and so on. UV light is often known as “black” light, bordering on the outside edge of what we can see by eye, usually looking a deep, dim purple, but once it hits a fluorescent object you realize how much light is being put out by how much re-emits in a visible spectrum. And of course, there’s all that CSI stuff about finding bodily fluids and all that, which is true. But, different wavelengths have different effects, and since I had the lights to try and spot scorpions (my original intentions,) I did a little research into this, and found that the best results were obtained at 395 nanometers wavelength; shorter than that had a tendency to spook off the scorpions. Plus I wanted a flashlight that took 18650 rechargeable batteries like the headlamp, because they’re powerful and I had several already. So I ordered a new one.

It arrived during a spell when it got warmer at night, and I took it out for a spin after a few indoor tests. Near one of the bluebird boxes, I tried to turn it on and nothing happened, but I’d tested it earlier and it was fine. I remember disassembling it to see if I could switch the lens, because the beam was not exactly what I wanted, and I suspected that I’d slipped the contacts when I reassembled it so, standing out in the dark yard, I took it apart and put it back together, being rewarded by the eruption of the purple glow before it was even fully rescrewed. Aiming it up at the bluebird box, I was startled by the brilliant, two-tone neon pink face peering suspiciously out at me, which soon withdrew. I can’t emphasize the effect enough – the squirrel looked like a child’s toy, rendered in colors that were in no way natural, and there was a different level of emittance between that brown upper coat and the white undercoat; brown and white in natural light, of course, but middle pink and brilliant pink in UV. It was exhilarating.

But only proof of effect. Photographing this was going to take something else. I knew the light was going to be dim, so a decent exposure would take some time; at least a second, possibly several, and during that time I’d be expecting the squirrel to hold still and give me a sharp image. Yeah, fat chance – they’re shy, but as hyperactive as the average grey squirrel. This might take quite a few tries. In the meantime, fired up by the success of the first test, I wandered around for a little to see what else might pop up under the UV beam, because I’d already discovered before that a few arthropods, and some saps and fungi, fluoresced nicely. So I checked out the yard, and wandered down to the nearby pond.

I can recommend, if you ever want to try this, to ensure that you find a light that’s 395nm or higher, because the effect is noticeably different. Things that were only faintly visible under the blue light of the headlamp showed up much better under the 395 light, and some kinds of fungi were only visible at that wavelength. The Apheloria virginiensis montana centipedes became active in the yard at the first hint of warmer weather, and they show brilliantly under the new flashlight. It remains too early to see any of the spined micrathena spiders yet.

The it turned cold again, then it warmed a little and I took The Girlfriend out to see if the squirrel would peek out for her, which it did, just barely, but enough to demonstrate the lovely color. Then it had gotten ugly NC winter cold yesterday, dropping below freezing overnight; I had to chip the frozen raindrops off of the car this morning, but went out in the afternoon without shoes on as the temperature rose above 20°c – seriously, who’s programming this shit? But it meant the evening was warmer again, and The Girlfriend and I went out again to check on the nest box, being treated to the squirrel’s little face watching us again. She held still so well that I immediately went in and got the camera and tripod.

I boosted ISO to 800, not really sure how this would work for quality but needing the shorter exposure times. I focused manually, very quickly with a visible flashlight, then aimed the UV light at the box and stood ready with the remote release. The flying squirrel within gave me several opportunities and I fired off about a dozen frames, getting a shorter shutter speed than expected – within 1 to 2 seconds, and I could see from the LCD preview that I was getting something. Not wanting to disturb the squirrel too much, I let it be after about two minutes and unloaded the memory card to see what I’d captured.

*     *     *

And at that point I let the post draft go, even though I had at least one of the images that I intended to use, I never uploaded it. So now (in mid-December) we continue:

southern flying squirrel Glaucomys volans fluorescing under 395nm UV light
Curiously, the image came out a little dark though I had let the camera set its own exposure – this is slightly puzzling. It would seem to mean that the exposure meter can pick up more of the UV light than the sensor itself, which might be true – it’s possible that the sensor has its own ultra-violet filter, and I know it has its own infra-red, something that is removed if the camera body is custom modified to shoot IR. Also curious, the squirrel does not seem as fluoresced as I recall it when viewing directly, the darker fur barely visible above the minimal reflectance of the nest box, so does the sensor have a certain cutoff that is still visible to our eyes, or was it only my imagination? Only a lot of tests or some very specific research will tell for sure. In the meantime, I’ve tweaked the same image for a better view.

southern flying squirrel Glaucomys volans fluorescing under 395nm UV light
Also of note is the focus. I said above I manually focused the camera by (visible) flashlight, but one thing I know from experience is that, when shooting in infra-red at least, the focus ring has to be tweaked manually away from what appears focused to our eyes, because the longer wavelengths of IR light get bent even more by the lens, so it is likely the same for UV, and I should purposefully shorten the focus when attempting this again – by how much, of course, is going to be difficult to determine. Will autofocus work? I have my doubts, because it needs a minimum amount of light, and while it worked for the Canon Pro 90 IS in infra-red, that was also during daylight with the sun as a light source and not a little 3.7v flashlight. And of course, I could always increase my depth by stopping down the aperture, but that will drop the shutter speed too, and that’s not the best of moves with twitchy little squirrels.

The chances of pursuing this further this year are likely gone; even if I have any flying squirrels using the nest boxes right now (I tend not to check a lot to avoid disturbing them,) they’re almost certainly hibernating for the winter and won’t appear again until spring. I know, I know – such a down note when I’m supposed to be making the most of winter, but hey, you can bear with it.

My seasonal charity work

Al Denelsbeck

I know this is going to come off sounding like bragging, and it’s not intended that way at all but, well, so be it. I am presently working on a plugin that will eradicate every last vestige of ‘Baby Yoda’ from your internet browser – all memes, all photos, all mentions, all cookie cutters, all bumper stickers, everything. It’s quite a comprehensive program, but sorely needed and already long overdue.

If you’d like to contribute to the success of this endeavor, hit me up and I’ll provide appropriate credit.

No, I’m not porting it over to smutphones – fuck people doing everything on their damn phones, they deserve what they get.

Odd memories, part 23

Al Denelsbeck

I sit here this afternoon with a small (in size) project alongside me, waiting for the epoxy to dry. It isn’t exactly a christmas present, but it is a necessary part of one, and I just spent no small amount of time making it. This was nowhere near the amount of time I spent trying to find one already made, which should have been a lot easier than it was, and a lot more fruitful because, it wasn’t – I never found it. Well, let me correct that slightly: it’s possible that I had, but none of the sellers saw fit to give me the crucial measurement that I needed to know that it would work, and of those that did include the measurement, it was either a) distinctly inaccurate, or b) intended for something else. So I ended up making it, and it works, so all is well in Al Land at the moment, despite my gently simmering aggravation. Once the epoxy is set, I can continue.

In the meantime, we have some stories, but without any illustrating images, so it can’t be one of the (two remaining!) storytime posts. I was reminded of this by seeing recently the holiday card failures that people have posted, and remembered that I was borderline responsible for one. Kinda, only not really. Allow me to elucidate.

It was the mid-nineties and I was working in a photo lab, one of the many 1-hour chains that dotted the urban mall before they died out under their own incompetence, and I can certainly vouch for it personally in regards to the chain I worked for: CPI Photo, which was far more focused on marketing than on producing a quality product, and this was reflected constantly. Except, they weren’t terribly focused on marketing, either, because they relied on badly outdated gimmicks and those kind of non-promotions that people never fall for, like putting only the picture frames that nobody actually wants on sale, and of course, insisting on answering the phone with a fucking script. However, they had one aspect that actually worked, which was to produce christmas cards with a variety of templates and the ability to insert the image of your choice. Since this was before digital was readily available to the consumer market (cameras at that time were in the $10,000+ range,) naturally we worked with film and negatives.

Printing by negative was slightly tricky, because of course the image is inverted and overall orange, and at times it was extremely difficult to tell what you were actually seeing. You might think that this wouldn’t make any difference – just print the damn thing – but the print machines had their own exposure meters, and you had to keep an eye on them because they could be wrong just like the camera’s meter could, and it was up to the operator to correct the exposure as needed.

On this particular day, I was running off a batch of christmas cards showing the family’s two kids hanging out on the backyard playset, and had just finished the run and was removing the negative strip from the bracket when I saw the very next frame in the sequence, which was definitely not the two kids. I popped it back in and fired off another print, with the card mask and template still in place, just to see if my suspicions were correct. And then, as we were on deadlines with each order, went on to the next as the print run processed through the machine, which would take about seven minutes.

I was not at the output chute as it came through however – that was another employee, who was bagging and boxing the prints as necessary, and I was reminded about the test shot when I heard him exclaim, “What the hell?” I paused the run and went to have a look, confirming what I thought I’d seen: the very next frame on the negative strip was (I’m guessing) the wife and mother, sitting on the bed pulling up her stockings without a hell of a lot else on. She was posed so that there was no actual nudity, nothing to get censored in any way, but certainly suggestive and risqué enough – right there with “Merry Christmas!” alongside. And at that moment, I toyed with the idea of printing off just a couple more to put on the top of the stack of christmas cards, to give the parents a minor heart attack in thinking that they were all like that. I wisely dismissed this; some people could have seen the humor in it, might even have sent a couple of those cards to their friends, while others would have an absolute shit fit. There are way too many uptight people around, even when they take photos like that.

And there were plenty of people who took photos like that. Believe me, digital has produced this major advantage in that you don’t have to have a lab see your cheesecake (and beyond) photos now, but for decades, someone was going to have to process them, unless you had your own darkroom. And in the, what, six months that I wasted my time with that idiotic business, I saw my share of them. It might sound titillating (I am required by Writers’ Code to use that word here,) but the grim reality is, most people aren’t really in the best of shape, and most especially don’t have the grasp of posing and lighting, that it takes to make the kind of nude photos you’re imagining; one of the reasons that I refuse to shoot any kind of model sessions is my awareness of how little I know about making it work. Plus, I’ve spoken with numerous photographers who would rather perform various indelicate tortures on themselves than work with an amateur, because modeling is a skill and art form all its own.

Probably the most uncomfortable experience that I had there was when the subject of the photo session herself showed up to pick up the photos, and only 20 minutes earlier I’ve been seeing quite explicit details of her anatomy as she sprawled on her coffee table. Normally we took the prints out for the customer and invited them to look through and pick out any that they might have wanted reprints or enlargements of, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Hey, it was the nineties – it was a more innocent time then, with no Tinder accounts where you could tell total strangers about your prowess at eating ass…

We had college students that frequented the lab, with the typical party shots. One group of young women, very likely a bit inebriated, had chronicled their antics in abundant detail, and while nothing at all, again, required keeping from children, there was more than a few suggestive and explicit poses that would have presented some difficulty in explaining to them (“They’re, uh, doing charades for Basic Instinct, I think.”) I recognized the ladies when they came to collect their prints, and as I handed the packages over I remarked a bit impishly, “We’re not letting you guys have a camera ever again.” Their eyes went wide with shock, clearly not remembering much at all about the evening, and I declined to answer their frantic inquiries, simply handing over the rolls while I returned to my work. In moments, the lab was ringing with shrieks and exclamations of horror (albeit good-natured,) and after a minute or two of this I couldn’t resist asking, “So, how many reprints do you need?” For some reason they didn’t order any…

Another time, as I was covering the lab alone, a gorgeous young woman came in to see if I could help her, and produced an 8×10 print of herself done at one of the glamour photography studios that used to exist as well, this one just down the mall from us. The shot was extremely flattering, with a deep plunging neckline and a distinctly come-hither expression, and the woman pointed directly at her cleavage (well, in the photo) and asked if I could remove that. I managed not to blurt out, “Why?” and realized that she was indicating this small spot where her black lacy bra was peeking out – she really wanted nothing visible there but her own more-than-adequate self. Eventually, I determined that the studio refused to reshoot the photo without another fee and couldn’t/wouldn’t touch it up themselves. Now, we had retouching dyes, but they were intended for scratches and such, basically a white background and thus wouldn’t work on the black bra, and for copyright reasons we couldn’t reshoot the print itself. Nowadays with digital editing I would have had that fixed in seven-and-a-half seconds, and if we’d had opaque inks rather than dyes in the lab I might have been able to mask it back then (perfectly color-matching skin tones with dyes/inks is quite challenging in itself,) but I had to tell her that I couldn’t help her at all. A couple weeks later I got to see the photo again, this time an advertisement in an entertainment circular: she was the headlining act at the top-end strip club nearby. The photo in the ad had been cropped just above the intruding bra (and of course now it made even more sense, because the suggestion of undergarments, no matter how sexy, isn’t what you want to present in such cases.)

And a final memory, back to that same christmas. The Broadway musical Cats was doing one of its US tours at the time and played in Raleigh, and several castmembers had spent the day at the mall, having their photos taken with Santa (“I want a new crinkle-ball and some tinsel to barf up.”) A few of them came in the lab to get some christmas cards done up and decided to hang out for the print run – very friendly and chatty. The woman who played ‘Rumpleteazer’ left me an autographed christmas card – I hadn’t asked, because I don’t collect autographs (no, not even of strippers,) but another worker had and she felt she shouldn’t snub me, I guess. And perhaps it’s disturbing, but that pretty much sums up my celebrity encounters – it’s still central NC, you know, so it’s not like we get Clay Aiken or Michael Jordan around here.

Keeping my hand in

Al Denelsbeck

There definitely needs to be a little better planning on our part, meaning we humans, because we have two major holidays that come up in winter, which is good because we need something positive to focus upon as the weather goes hyurgl, but they’re slammed close together towards the beginning of the season (in fact, there’s yet another holiday beating them both to the draw, coming up very soon,) and then there’s bupkiss afterward. We need something exciting to happen, say in mid-February, to help break all this up. And no, not Valentine’s Day, which counts as anything from wishy-washy to downright sadistic for up to half of the population. Let’s start a movement to make Darwin Day (February 12) much bigger than it is, with special food dishes and television specials and so on; this will have the added benefit of really pissing off the creationists, so win-win there.

But until that happens, we have nature photographers in the mid-latitudes, or at least me (how many others do you follow?) trying to drum up something of interest when it’s cold, grey, and rainy, which brings us to this. I had a couple of idle photo topics that I’d been intending to tackle for a while now, and finally did some shooting. Don’t get too excited, seriously.

The first is, while in central New York I collected a bunch of freshwater snail shells from the lake I grew up on (directly on, raised on a raft – I learned to hunt crayfish long before I learned to ride a bike.) It’s kind of curious; for a long time I never even knew the lake hosted snails, and then one winter when the ice was thick enough to venture out on but still pretty clear, my friend and I found a huge collection of shells on the bottom, well out from the shore but still in shallow water, and knocked a hole in the ice to collect a bunch, practically freezing our hands solid in doing so. Then I never saw many again, up until this summer. The place that I’d stayed at suddenly got inundated with them this year, on the shores and in the small bay by the docks, when they never had before; some vagary of currents had washed millions of them ashore, so collecting them was a matter of just digging my hands into the mounds of them in the shallows.

freshwater snail shells from Cayuga Lake
As usual, shells look much better wet than dry, and after cleaning them, they developed a dull, muted coloration, not half as interesting as they’d appeared when wet. Now, I could always soak them down before shooting, but I decided to try something else, and picked a small selection to paint with clear acrylic. This had the desired affect, as well as making them easier to handle than wet shells, which not only require drying one’s hands before grabbing the camera, but also makes them tend to cling together and drip and all that.

freshwater snail shells treated with clear acrylic
Despite the fact that I was indiscriminate in just collecting a few handfuls of them, none were occupied by live snails; those don’t tend to get driven much by currents, and the snails themselves aim for areas that provide their food and not expanses of empty houses.

None of these were very big either, averaging about 15-20mm in length, but some of them were remarkably small.

comparing the size of two freshwater snail shells
I’m showing roughly the biggest and smallest here, ranging from 28mm down to just under 7, and no, I’m not finding out what species they belong to – I’m not even sure where to begin looking.

The sand, by the way, is some pretty fine stuff, not from central New York but from coastal NC. From a typical viewing distance it appears pale grey, but up close the quartz nature of it can be seen easily. ‘Up close’ means with some serious macro magnification, the reversed 28-105.

smallest freshwater snail shell with sand
This is the same small shell again. Like I said, I tend to save these projects for the slow season, and two days ago when I tackled this, it had literally rained all day long, so, yeah.

But I had something else that I did this session, which had been sitting in my curio cabinet for, oh, since this outing.

dried remains of juvenile river cooter Pseudemys concinna
I found this deceased turtle, exactly as seen here, sitting atop the washout detritus left behind by high river levels, and figured it had not been there long, but how long ago it had actually expired I could only guess. The lack of any ridges around its scutes (shell pattern pieces) indicate that it was less than a year old when it died, and overall it measures 39mm, slightly larger than a large coin or, if this helps (of course it does,) the same diameter as a film can. I am reasonably sure this is a river cooter (Pseudemys concinna) due to some details that we’re about to see.

empty eye socket of deceased juvenile river cooter Pseudemys concinna
But first, we go take a morbid peek into that eye socket, which shows just how much space a young turtle’s eyes take up in it head. Amphibian brains are not very big nor terribly developed, in comparison to many other classes anyway, but they’re still sufficient to the need.

Now we can take a look at more interesting and telling detail.

underside and plastron of deceased juvenile river cooter Pseudemys concinna
This detailed pattern on the plastron is what identifies the species, or so I believe – you know how often I hedge my bets. I mean, what if I decided (after some brain injury) to run for political office, and then someone dug up an old post of mine where I confidently misidentified a dead turtle? Imagine the scandal! No, I gotta play it safe.

[Yeah, like the posts ripping apart religion will all go past without notice in this country…]

One more detail shot, because.

hind claw of deceased juvenile river cooter Pseudemys concinna
This is one of the hind claws, and the exposed portion of the longest nail there measures all of 2mm. The skeleton of my specimen is surprisingly intact: one foreleg is missing, and a couple of neck vertebrae, but that appears to be it. Notably for turtles, the carapace and plastron form most of the ribcage and vertebrae, so what remains are the limbs, really. Yet as you can imagine, this is still very delicate, so it largely stays in my cabinet without being handled, a nature photographer’s version of a Star Wars figurine. Okay maybe not.

And I just realized that I tried to muddle through the dead season by shooting… dead things. Way to go, me. Maybe I should just stick to the cats or something.

I, uh… I’m gonna sit in the back now

Al Denelsbeck

Sometimes you wonder about your own mind. Or at least I do…

Here’s the story: My primary macro lens, for many years now, is a Mamiya-Sekor 80mm f4 Macro that was designed and intended for the Mamiya M645 series of medium-format cameras; I couldn’t tell you exactly when my lens was made, but the system ran from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties. I had purchased it for my Mamiya body, oh, eleven, twelve years ago? And when my Sigma 105 Macro got balky and I couldn’t afford to get it repaired or replaced, I made a quick and dirty adapter for the Mamiya lens and began using it on the Canon DSLR bodies. It is a testament to the quality of the lens that I’m still using it because nothing has ever beaten its performance.

Mamiya-Sekor 80mm f4 Macro lens
It came with a matched extension tube, essentially a spacer between lens and body which magnifies the image even further – sometimes I use this, sometimes I don’t, so it necessitates switching the tube on and off. This can be slightly fussy, especially when juggling the lens and camera body out in the field where I don’t want to drop anything. The lens has a slotted tab at the base where it engages the Mamiya bodies, directly linked to the aperture ring; this tells the body what aperture the lens is set at, because there is no electronic communication between body and lens while aperture is set on the lens itself. This way, the exposure meter in the medium-format body knows what aperture the photo will be taken with (even though it has not closed down yet – that will be done when the shutter trips) and can set exposure correctly. The tab can just be made out edge-on in these photos, the small brassy bit just below the aperture numbers at the bottom of the lens.

Mamiya-Sekor 80mm f4 Macro lens with affixed extension tube
When the extension tube is affixed as seen here, it has a tab of its own that will engage the slot in the tab on the lens. It is part of a free-spinning collar around the entire tube, and duplicates the slotted aperture tab down at its own base, to once again engage with the camera body and continue communication with the exposure meter.

The big bit is, that tab-and-collar has a tendency to slip around when the extension tube isn’t attached, and usually requires a bit of fumbling to get it to fit into the slot at the same time that the extension tube is lining up with the mounting ring at the base of the lens – especially since I want to hold the tube by the very collar that encircles it, which prevents the collar from moving easily to the slot. The knurled/ridged portions at the top and bottom of the tube are the fixed bits, what I should be grabbing, but obviously they’re not as easy to latch onto, especially when I’m endeavoring not to drop anything.

Now here’s the part that just occurred to me: the tab on the extension tube doesn’t have to engage anything at all. It’s intended solely to communicate with the Mamiya bodies, and I haven’t been using this lens on them. The aperture ring does nothing at all to communicate with the Canon bodies; instead, I have to meter exposure (when everything is not set manually, as it usually is with the flash rig,) with the lens manually stopped down so it is transmitting the proper amount of light. I could just slap the extension tube on without worrying about the little tab, as long as it’s out of the way.

Mamiya-Sekor 80mm f4 Macro lens with disengaged extension tube
I want you to understand, I’ve been messing with this damn thing for years, close to a decade I believe, and it never once occurred to me that I was wasting time screwing with having that tab aligned. I’m not proud…

To offset this chagrin, I will point out that, with this very post, I have surpassed the previous record for number of images uploaded in the year; that was 706 photos for 2015. And lest you think this post was simply to break that mark, I will point out that despite the yucky conditions, I have more photos coming very soon (they’re already shot.) Besides, it’s not like I never do frivolous nonsense posts anyway…

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