Early the other afternoon as I was running errands, I decided to stop by a semi-regular shooting locale and see what the conditions were like. After the long summer with high temperatures and no rain, we’ve had a wet spell, and the pond a short distance away, the one that plays host to green tree frogs so often, deserved a check. The frogs were indeed out, and those photos will be forthcoming, but right now I’m going to talk about something else, in the chance that you are not an experienced macro photographer but thinking about it. On the chance that you are not a bookkeeper for a non-profit agency but thinking about it, I’ll have a post about that too. I’ll get to them all eventually…
Here’s the basic premise: you can do macro work with a minimum of equipment, just finding subjects as you go along, but the ability to get quality photos will be much less than if you have, for instance, a portable and versatile lighting rig, or aim to be out for certain conditions that you’re prepared for, or shooting in a ‘studio’ setup, and so on. Macro work introduces a lot of demands, the chief among them a very narrow range of focus and short depth of field. You can increase the depth of field by closing down the aperture, but this makes the shutter speeds go much longer, and you fall prey to subject motion, camera shake, and simply your own inability to hold still right at the perfect focus distance (which may be measured in millimeters.) Add in less-than-optimum lighting and a stiff breeze, and you’re virtually guaranteed to throw out more than you keep – sometimes, even everything you just shot. Let’s look at my recent example.
So, an Eastern carpenter bee (Xylocopa virginica) was visiting a goldenrod cluster right next to me, and I did a quick impromptu session. A stiff breeze was blowing, the bee was far from holding still itself, and the light was a bit too high in contrast (worsened by the fact that I had no time to change to low-contrast camera settings.) Leaning in as quickly as I dared, I began firing off frames. Here’s the very first in the sequence, full frame to give you an idea of my working distance:
… and now, a detail crop from that same frame:
Did I mention that I was also using manual focus? With the extremely sharp Mamiya 80mm macro there really isn’t a choice, but often enough in such conditions you might want to use manual focus anyway, simply picking a setting and then doing fine adjustments with your camera/body position instead. Given the high-contrast conditions, the light is at a pretty good angle and shows great detail, the depth is about as ideal as you can get (note how the body details are all sharp, but the back wing is well out of focus,) and even the secondary leg peeked out into the sun enough to distinguish it from the shadow – the only portion where the shadows worked against me is near the rear abdomen where we can excuse (well, I can) the loss of detail. Anyway, even I looked at this image during sorting and said, “Aw, dayyumm…”
Am I failing to make my point? Don’t worry, here are the next seven frames, shot within the space of nine seconds, and cropped a little to show comparative detail.
As you can see, something doesn’t work in each of them, mostly bad light angles and a lack of critical sharpness (worse when seen at a greater resolution than the blog will produce.) That’s a 12.5% hit rate, and this is with a subject and conditions that I felt comfortable tackling; there were plenty of other options that day that I knew just wouldn’t work out, and simply didn’t take any frames. As you might imagine, a stiff breeze can make the entire flower cluster wave back and forth in a greater arc than my frame coverage, so waiting until the breeze is momentarily still is an absolute necessity. Of course, the bee may have moved on by then.
Given all of that, I credit the first image to a great deal of luck, and it’s understandable that at times the luck may just never materialize. You do what you can to improve your chances, and recognize that some conditions are just a bitch to work with.
And, that the really cool photos that you see (from anyone, of any subject) might just be the one that worked out of a huge pile that did not. I don’t recommend hosing around the camera in the hopes of snagging that one shot out of many – you’ll do better with knowing what you’re doing and what’s going to trash the shot – but at times, it’s still going to be that single frame that makes the grade.
This is, I think, the entire image, showing how the dark water dominated the frame and dictated the exposure – since cameras are always set to render a mid-tone from the light reaching the exposure meter, anything dark will be brightened up, and the small white flower, too small to affect the rest of the frame, got bleached out. This is why a good photographer pays attention to the overall brightness of the frame and compensates accordingly (which is why the image on that other post looks so much better.) But for our purposes here, it’s a neat effect.
Swallowtails, or indeed most butterflies, don’t hold still on flowers, and don’t sit with their wings extended out flat, so the behavior was the immediate clue to begin looking for something else. And even with this, it took a specific angle to see the spider that I was 99% certain was there.
After about two months, seriously, with no rain except for what the hurricane drove inland, the trend broke last night – and naturally, I had to be out in it getting completely soaked; thankfully, this was not with camera equipment. This morning the rain returned, which is fine since we badly need the water, and this time it brought a nice little electrical storm. I have no lightning images this time around, mostly because it was daylight so the shutter cannot be locked open waiting for a strike to occur (well, it can, but the result will be a solid white picture,) but also because the storm was centered almost directly overhead, not only making it dangerous to be out someplace, it was pouring and this obscures everything except the very closest strikes. So the image seen here is from back in July, and was a casual effort during another close storm that did not bring any rain – again, it wasn’t prudent to do a proper session, so this was captured by bracing the camera against the front porch railing and simply holding the shutter open. Not too bad for that, really – could easily have been worse, especially with the opportunity for camera shake. I include it solely for visual accompaniment.
I’ve mentioned this before but will say it again: for sunrise and sunset shots, bracketing the exposure heavily is highly recommended, and by this I mean, taking several frames both over and under exposed from what the camera’s exposure meter is reading; 
I did manage to get a little more cooperation from the birds as the morning progressed, but not as many frames as I would have liked. When a bird is flapping, only certain wing positions (like this one) look good in the air, but timing the shot to catch the wings right there is next to impossible. Or at the very least, beyond my present abilities. So while I was firing off a lot of frames in the hopes of capturing more than a few with a photogenic angle, a lot fewer of them actually showed this than I thought they might. Most especially, don’t just hold the shutter down and let the frame-per-second rate of the camera do the work, since it’s entirely possible that it runs at the same rate as the flapping (or any other repetitive action) and you just get a sequence of the exact same pose. Be sure to pause, and if you have something flapping slower, try to time the shot precisely.
This image was taken only three minutes after the previous, so the conditions were not significantly lighter, but the framing was slightly different, producing a different exposure and rendition of the colors. The unfortunate part of this was the high contrast nature of the water texture, disguising the egret’s beak and almost completely hiding the one tern in the air in front of the egret (did you see it?) Naturally, I wasn’t aware of how this would look until I had unloaded the memory card at home, and by then I was a couple of days and five hundred kilometers too late to do anything about it. Notice, though, the illustration of a trait I’d mentioned in the previous podcast, the lack of any waves or breakers. This might have been the timing of the tides – you can see some faint waves from the visit 
This is a little bit different story. I’d initially shot this with a flash too, before the sun was up, but returned to it afterwards to take advantage of natural light, which did a vastly better job of rendering the scene. I have little doubt that the large crab who made that burrow did not just happen to find a fish head on its doorstep, but chose to make a new burrow where a lasting meal would be handy. At least until the seabirds made off with it – you can see the footprints of the first marauder in the fresh sand. Again, note the low light angle and the color cast, something that also worked well for the 
I think the little guy at right is a bird-voiced treefrog (Hyla avivoca,) but the variety of photos and markings that I’ve seen for that species make this tentative at best – it’s the closest I can come to pinning down an ID, anyway. It wasn’t calling when I spotted it, so that avenue of confirmation wasn’t open to me.
The specimen above had me suspect that I’d finally found one, until I carefully leaned in a little closer and could see the markings better; instead, this is a southern banded water snake (Nerodia fasciata,) and completely harmless, despite having the same habitat and behavior as a cottonmouth, save for the open-mouth threat display that the latter has at times (which is where it gets its name.) This is a small one, less than 40 cm long and perhaps slightly larger in diameter than my thumb, and while the headlamp confused it, it was starting to get suspicious after a minute or two and slowly slipped off into the undergrowth.
Tucked up well underneath the cover was this green treefrog (Hyla cinerea,) who obviously couldn’t remain there because I was about to fire up the grill. I was surprised to see it, since we don’t see many green treefrogs in the immediate area. I suspected it was the one I had brought home from the garden shop 