So, on this date fourteen years ago came the very first post on the blog. And I realized, at the beginning of this month, that another milestone was coming up, so I made sure to have them converge: this is the 2,500th post itself. I have to admit that no one’s congratulatory cards have arrived yet, but I’m putting this down to the holiday rush – I’m sure they’ll be along any day now.
Shelving that for the moment, I figured it was time for a podcast, since we’ve had so few (like, one) this year. Plenty of other stuff, mind you, but only one podcast. Two, now.
In fact, I uploaded 14 video clips this year, so that’s been expanding nicely.
We’re letting you know because this is liable to be on the quiz, but the 2,000th post was 21 months ago. That’s, let’s see, off the top of my head it would be an average of 23.8095238089 posts per month in that bracket – somewhere around there, anyway – and should that rate continue, it would put us at the 3,000th post in September 2024; I predict it will be September 24th, just for the sake of it and to use the <sup> tags one more time.
But yeah, that’s enough harping on a meaningless number. It was a nice recap excuse, though…
I had plans for a particular offering for this ‘last’ post in the topic, but it’s been taking longer than I have time for, and so we have this instead, though the original choice will appear later on – it’s in progress and one of those things that you shouldn’t rush.
So our opening image is from July 2012:
This is a Chinese mantis (Tendoera sinensis) of course, and taken right out in front of where we used to live. There’s nothing terribly compelling about this image, or at least not now, because it came early on in my extended pursuit of the species – it shows how the eyes darken at night, and gives a hint of the facets of the compound eyes which I would later capture in much better detail. The reason that I selected this image is because it came a few months earlier than the next:
In fact, this was taken exactly ten years ago today, part of the reason I chose it. This is an orchid mantis (Hymenopus coronatus,) and not at all native, hailing from southeast Asia instead, though my travel to get this image was considerably less than implied, since it was on display at the Museum of Life & Science in Durham – the only time, in fact, that I’ve seen them out on display. And yes, I did the best I could to provide similar poses among the self-imposed constraints of this post, because I do things like that – don’t ask why, and you won’t embarrass either of us.
Mantids of any kind are cool of course, but some varieties around the world are particularly stunning in terms of their camouflage and appearance, and I did what I could with the terrariums of the museum, but wanted to get a lot more images. This may take place some day: orchid mantises are available for sale, though not cheaply, and of course would almost certainly have to be shipped. The egg case would be the best manner of shipping, except that they’re not native so no one needs a few hundred of them to house and feed while preventing escapes, even if it is only for the season (March through October, generally – mantids are only summer insects.) Not to mention that, if they’re charging nearly $50 for an individual, no one’s going to sell an entire egg case.
However, my brother did bring me down two egg cases from New York, and I suspect these are European mantids which I’ve never seen around here, so perhaps in the spring I may have some slightly different species to tackle.
But back to the topic. Visible differences? Well, color and head shape, obviously, and I unfortunately could not get a decent full-body shot of the orchid mantis for better comparisons. One visible difference is actually incorrect: the top one was shot at night, the bottom one at midday, but the macro flash was enough to illuminate the close background of the Chinese mantis and disguise the darkness, while it was inadequate to get any background for the orchid mantis, which is fine because it would have been the exterior of the terrarium in the museum. Do the orchid mantis eyes go dark at night as well? I have no reason to believe otherwise, but no proof either – the security at the museum is too good. The mantids were pretty comparable in size, but their antennae are significantly different, don’t ask me why.
So, another of this topic will slide in eventually, but perhaps not before we begin a new yearly topic. What will that be? Ah, you just have to wait (mostly because I don’t actually know yet myself.)
Back when I worked at an auto-parts store, I was familiar with the idea of the tinkerer, and even worked with someone who had a “Tuner Cult” decal on their car. In essence, it the person who is perpetually working on cars, improving, upgrading, tweaking this that and the other thing because if there’s any room for improvement, they can’t rest until this has been accomplished. Which is a never-ending quest, because someone always comes up with something new to be changed on any given automobile, especially the popular “performance” models.
I always viewed this with quiet dismissal – while I like having a decently-performing car, it’s not a competition, and I don’t judge anyone on their car and couldn’t care less if they judged me on mine, plus I could always find better things to spend money on. Hell, I don’t even spend that much on photo equipment.
But…
Back in March I picked up a small, second-hand 3D printer. I used to do a lot of model work when I was younger, cars and planes and spaceships, and still keep my hand in even though I don’t work on kits 1/10th as much as I used to, so the idea of producing my own parts and designs was pretty compelling – I’ve done it the old-fashioned way plenty of times before, combining parts or outright carving what I needed, but that was small potatoes compared to fabricating an entirely original design. Yet, I knew they were expensive and the learning curve for both the printer itself and the software for 3D design could be steep; I wasn’t anxious to delve into this for the occasional model work that I was doing. Still, when the basic printer came up for much less than I’d thought I’d ever have to spend, I took the chance and started learning all this stuff about fused deposition modeling.
It’s safe to say that I fell into this trap like a sucker, and am as bad as any tuner cultmember now. Not only did I do several serious upgrades to that little machine, in early November I picked up another, larger model, and have been upgrading that while printing dozens of designs – most of them not my own, I admit. However, I am getting my uses out of them and having an absolute blast.
This is not a printing failure but Kolosos’ model of a tardigrade, a real animal, though a few thousand times life sizeA word about the recent purchase: I came across some listings for some ‘returned, unrepaired’ units from retailers, where they admitted that they hadn’t evaluated the printers to know what was wrong and thus sold them at significantly reduced prices. 3D printers are actually pretty easy to work on, most of them coming as kits anyway, and spare parts are easy to obtain; buyer reviews were primarily quite positive. I took the chance, and the unit that I received was brand new – all parts still in original packaging, nothing missing, basically an ‘open box’ deal. It’s printing as I type this, having cost me less than half what it retailed for. Can’t complain about that.
The ‘upgrade’ thing needs some clarification too. While it implies that the printers aren’t as carefully designed or built as they could be, which is true in some cases, it’s more often the idea that someone found ways to improve performance or usability, very often by 3D printing parts for the very machine, and shared them with others; the 3D community is vast and extremely helpful. 95% of the time, any issues can be resolved with a websearch and a few tweaks, or perhaps a new part, and within two days of the arrival, I’d already added a better filament feed system, some slot covers to prevent collecting debris within, and a corner tool stand – that I also altered the design of to accommodate my own preferences (it needed a spot for forceps.) A lot more has been added since, and for christmas I received a few more upgrades intended to seriously expand performance and capability – and here I am typing up a post…
Not my own design, but a modification of works by fukumay and DieZopfeThere is a podcast coming up where I talk about luck this year, and one of the things that I forgot to mention therein was a windfall of raw materials for the printer. A nearby company was getting out of FDM printing in favor of SLA (resin,) and was unloading all of their unused filament – they hated the idea of it going to a landfill. I responded to their ad, with the result that I got a couple dozen spools of material, several hundred dollars’ worth, for free. This has not helped my restraint in the slightest.
The most used material, by virtually everyone, is PLA, or poly-lactic acid, which is essentially corn starch – seriously. It’s non-toxic, produces no harmful fumes during printing (a faint sweet smell, actually,) and is biodegradeable. And you couldn’t distinguish this from the plastics of your smutphone case or computer keyboard. Other materials are available of course, optimized for usage and not as environmentally friendly, but overall the impact is significantly less that you’d expect.
So, I have something to keep me occupied through the slow winter months, that stimulates my creative proclivities and gives me some more challenges – I’m cool with that. Kind of obsessed, really, but until the bugs and lizards come back out I’ll be able to keep busy and grumble about the weather less.
We’re sliding backwards a bit to 2011 here, solely because this was taken on this date back then. This is Kaylee, only about six months old here, with her christmas gift, and while she seems quite enamored of her stuffed toy, check the ears – she’s kicking the living hell out of it. Which was the intention, so it’s cool. For no more than two days she considered this a great punching bag, then showed no further interest in it from then on – we still have this cast-off Valentine’s Day gift, somewhere, and from time to time I test her with it to see if she’ll recover her interest in abusing it, but no dice so far.
Happy holidays, everyone! Here’s hoping you all receive something to try and disembowel, if only for a day.
This one goes way back before the origins of this blog, only not really – it’s been featured here before, though I’ll let you figure out when. And while The Manatee gets credit for the photo, twice really, I’m responsible for the carnage you see here. Truth be told, this is a crass Photoshop job; despite all evidence to the contrary, despite the seamlessness, despite the stunning realism, one of these people was not actually present, though decorum prevents me from indicating who. By my own hand was this belief that they’d seen the Great Wall in person promoted, and it’s been gnawing away at me ever since (my participation in this charade, not the Great Wall itself.) At last, I must come clean and cleanse myself of this foul act, revealing to the world that this is an editing job, because no one would have been able to tell otherwise – it’s that goddamn good.
By the most enormous of coincidences, it’s also the birthday of the person who really isn’t there, and what better time to challenge their boasts of having trodden the Great Wall? I say this early so you can get your own licks in, should you recognize the interloper. Too long, too long has this gone unchecked. Shatter this lie and scatter the pieces to the winds, however you do that.
But yeah, happy birthday anyway! Have fun living this one down!
The 1980s were this curious time in the pop music biz, because it became virtually necessary for bands to create a music video for anything that they wanted to become popular, which was controversial in itself – a lot of artists didn’t care for the medium, didn’t like the idea of making little movies, didn’t have good ideas, resented that the rules had changed, and so on. Some – most, perhaps – left the whole thing entirely up to their labels or any director that wanted the gig, and this occasionally resulted in some really lame productions.
This particular pair of videos I find amusing, in that they’re from the same band in the same time frame, actually the same album; that would be the band Yes, and the album 90125. We’ll do them in the order of release.
‘Owner of a Lonely Heart’ came out in 1983, fairly early in the game, and the video was truncated for airplay at times because, well, you can determine why:
What starts out as a fairly typical, faux studio session breaks down and restarts as a short, semi-dystopian story rife with symbolism, examining inner turmoil. Notably, it’s cast quite well and shows excellent production values and sets, and while it could barely, if at all, be said to relate to the music, it nonetheless presents a captivating story that keeps us watching; the switches back and forth between color and monochrome work well. The band members appear, but in a manner totally unrelated to music, serving as… agents? Parts of the psyche? Metaphors? Essentially just enough to take part, but remaining mostly extraneous to the plot. Overall, however, it was a major production that showed a lot of creativity and vision, most especially for the time.
The following year, ‘Leave It’ was released:
Even as inept as I am about interpreting music and film, I’m not even going to try on this one, but I suspect the budget was a bit lower. There is likely a story behind it, perhaps even a protest from the band who wanted to keep the focus on the music
[And here, we have a drastic change from the original post, which I was writing as I was waiting for balky pages to load. Because there is a story behind it. First off, it was directed by Godley and Creme, who were particularly known for music video production and did some of the more iconic offerings – which initially made this quite perplexing. But there was a gimmick: there were actually fifteen versions, all submitted to MTV and part of a contest for viewers to determine the differences between them. It’s not hard to see this as a cheap marketing ploy to increase both airtime and viewer attention. You can, if you like, scour the internet and see how many you can find. For my part, it makes for a slightly more interesting aspect of the video, but it would have helped if the videos had been the faintest bit interesting themselves. Though I still like both songs.]
Today’s entry comes from 2014 – or is it 2013? It was actually uploaded in December 2013 for a post that didn’t appear until January of the next year, though it was taken in 2006, so how does that count, judges? We need a ruling…
I like the image, being one of the uncommon strictly fartsy attempts, but, it suffers from a digital trait that prevents it from becoming a print, unless I do a lot of screwing around with it.
Even at this resolution, if you look close at the gradient tones in the water alongside the tree, you’ll see blotchiness – this is the result of jpeg compression. Jpeg is a method of storing image files in smaller format, a flexible algorithm to weigh space versus quality. Most of the images that I upload here are at about 75% of original quality, and occasionally, like this one, it shows: there are ‘steps’ between neighboring colors. Most times, you would use a setting of higher quality/lower compression to combat this – except that this is an image from the Canon Pro90 IS, originally saved in jpeg, and it even appears in the original to a lesser degree.
This is why many photographers elect to always shoot and save their initial images in RAW format, which has no compression at all. RAW images, however, are vastly larger than even minimal compression jpeg, and this shows quickly in the number of images that can be held on memory cards, and how long it takes to download them, and how much harddrive space they perpetually stake out. I’ve done several tests with RAW formats, including exposure and detail tweaking, and it’s only in situations like this, with a lot of fine gradients (mostly in one color) that it provides an edge; everywhere else, it’s simply egregious overkill, far too many negatives to offset the positives. Even with astrophotography where fine sensitivities in brightness can be exploited/enhanced for better detail, I could find no significant benefit – often none at all – for RAW over jpeg.
Note, too, that larger files take up web server space and slow page loads down, so for web use they should always be reduced in size regardless, and the benefit of RAW would vanish in nearly all cases. Considering that this blog alone has over 6,000 images in it, this can add up quickly. And here’s the thing: had you even noticed it before I mentioned it?
That’s right, it’s the winter solstice today, or technically it was at 21:48 UTC, the very time when the sun sank as low as… no, that’s not exactly right, it was actually when the Earth tilted… no, that’s not really right either, it was when the south pole of the Earth was leaned as close to the sun as it can be, the very thing that makes winter in the northern hemisphere and summer in the southern. Had, you know, someone not screwed up and misaligned the Earth in its orbital plane, we wouldn’t be dealing with this seasonal crap, and you’d change climates solely by changing location.
Probably not, actually – there’d probably be something else that affected all that jazz – but what it means for us today is that, up here in the northern hemisphere, this was the shortest daylight period of the year, and those times will just be increasing again up until late June. Except for, like central New York, which has at least three more months of nearly daily overcast to cope with, because that’s winter in NY, one of the (many) reasons that I left. But we over the hump, is what I’m saying. I would have done something photographically to herald this, but we had near-overcast skies here too for most of the day and, really, there wasn’t a lot to photograph, and even less that was worth featuring. So to cheat (and put up an older image that is not in the Living In The Past lineup,) we have a photo from the summer solstice, June 21, only not the upcoming one but the one just past. This was one of those that I didn’t post then, so it counts as new material. It does.
I would say this is the first of the ‘Caption This!’ contests here, except no one is reading anyway so I’d win all of the prizes, which is a wash unless I find a really stupid sponsor to provide some. Regardless, don’t let your non-existence as a reader prevent you from sending in your entries anyway – the deadline is, oh, shall we say the winter solstice 2034? That should allow up to seven entries to accumulate…
Our opening image today comes from 2003, and is only the second frame in my Arthropods folders – all seven of them (at present count.) Since I limit the folders to about 4,000 images for convenience, I’ll let you do the math, but I just started the seventh a month or so ago so don’t aim too high. But this is also the first of the extreme macro images, and was accomplished with the borrowed Sony F717 and one of the lesser-known but easier macro techniques called ‘lens-stacking:‘ mount a standard 50mm lens, backwards, onto a longer focal length, generally 200mm or better. The greater the difference, the greater the magnification. All it takes is a simple reversing ring in the filter threads of both lenses, quite inexpensive, and of course both lenses, but it’s not like it’s hard to find a 50mm around, which doesn’t need to be compatible with your current equipment in the least. The biggest issue is the distortion that will almost certainly get worse towards the edges of the frame, but not too far behind are holding still enough for the extremely precise focus distance, and getting some light onto the subject as close as it is to the lens, which may be only a few centimeters. You can tell here that the source is quite bright, too bright, and coming from the underside, a flash unit on an off-camera cord. Still, I was pleased with the detail on this cobweb spider, probably a house spider in the genus Steatoda or Parasteatoda.
I must note that this was early in my arachnid-handling days and I was still leery of handling something that I knew wasn’t dangerous, and so this one was gassed with acetone, and quite dead for the photo. Yet this also meant that I wasn’t trying to nail focus on a spider that wasn’t inclined to pose, which is a fair number of them.
Now we’ll jump a dozen years later.
This remains my favorite spider portrait, and you can see why. The ‘facial’ detail is excellent, the light in the eyes is slick, in fact the overall light quality is near-perfect from the softbox I was using at the time – the only caveat I have is that the softbox was rectangular and it shows in the eye reflections if you look closely.
Some credit goes to the species (which I believe is a crab spider Tmarus angulatus): it simply had the detail to capture and a curious, uncommon coloration. But other differences are the light quality, as noted – I’d learned how to use more diffuse and broader sources – and the bare fact that the latter was shot not just alive, but in situ atop its egg cluster, secure in a rolled-up leaf. Better framing of course, but let me note that both images are only cropped slightly – the latter had been trimmed on the long side just to eliminate wasted space, so I did the same for the first image to make them comparable, but no other edits were performed. The macro techniques were slightly different – instead of lens stacking for the second image, I used a reversed lens instead, the defunct 28-105 which had been permanently set for about f16, which provided an edge in depth.
The third image used for the ‘Visibly different, part 18‘ post split the difference between ‘staged/captive’ and ‘wild’ subjects – another spider portrait, but this one collected without restraint and slipped onto the water surface of my macro aquarium. At any point in time it could have scrambled away, but the meal it was consuming probably kept it less inclined to do so, and my unobtrusive handling method failed to alarm it. Still, I must give credit to an enormous amount of luck.
One last Visibly Different post to go for the year, and if all goes well, it’ll be a pair of ‘showoff’ images, but hopefully ones you can appreciate – not spiders, in other words. I’m actually working on them now (well, not right now, but I’m resuming as soon as I’m done writing this post,) yet I’m not sure that I’ll be finished in time given, you know, the other demands of the week. If not, they’ll appear in a bonus installment of the topic just a little later on.
I’m kind of doing these in order, and we’re in 2013 for this one, a year dominated by arthropod photos. I’m trying not to get into a rut (well, any more than the huge one that I usually occupy,) and the next entry in this category is quite likely to be another bug, so enjoy this while it lasts.
This was found, appropriately enough, in Colonial Park Cemetery in downtown Savannah, Georgia – I have no idea what the tree is but I love the shapes, and hanging with Spanish moss (Tillandsia usneoides) as it is just adds to the… we can’t really call it charm, so let’s go with atmosphere. To me at least, it has an almost palpable texture to it, enhanced by the subtle colors. I would have liked to have seen it in the dark, lit by the nearby historic streetlamps at low angles, but no one is allowed in the cemetery after sunset so the opportunity wasn’t there. There’s the chance that the lights wouldn’t produce a good effect anyway – in fact, I’m sure of it.
Funny, while it’s the kind of tree you might want to see in an old cemetery, it’s perhaps not the best example that I have – that would be this:
Now you see why I imagine the first tree might look great in the darkness? This is true B&W, by the way, shot on Ilford Delta 400 film, nine years earlier than the first image, while I was riding around looking for good monochrome subjects. Believe me, I’m pleased with it.
Though, despite doing several cemetery sessions while on this monochrome binge, this wasn’t shot in a cemetery, but in a schoolyard. So much for atmosphere.
