I was going to say we’re now less than a decade in the past, since I first posted this in March of 2013, but then I checked the image details and it was taken in October 2012, so it’s still a bit over a decade old. I know you needed to know.
But what looks like a Photoshop trick, isn’t – this is as shot, and not even a multiple exposure, simply a fruit fly (genus Drosophila) on a mirror. The one showing its back is the real one, the rest reflections. But why so many? It’s because the reflective surface of the mirror is on the back side of the glass, but the front surface can also reflect to a lesser extent, even images coming from behind/within, and so we’re seeing repeated reflections bouncing around within the glass, reminiscent of those ‘infinity’ mirrors and using the same principle. These are more noticeable because the flash was aimed towards the fly and so the background (the rest of the bathroom) was dark.
We can see the bright spot reflection from the back of the fly, showing the direction of the flash, but the underside is also lit quite well, due to the proximity of the mirror.
The whole thing about reflections from each surface of the glass was a big issue in the earlier days of camera lenses, and produced a lot of ghosts and flares, but with better lens coatings and additives within the glass itself, these are kept to a minimum nowadays. Not so much with bathroom mirrors.
More amusing is the fact that, for the slow season, I recycled an image used for the slow season. This says something, but I’ll be damned if I know what…
I know you were wondering if I was going to show any recognition whatsoever here on the blog that this week is/was Expand on Initial Experiments Week, where you sit down with something that you’d tried out before and build upon it, whether it be a recipe, some new electronic device, or seeing how long certain kinds of pasta will stick to the ceiling. Considering that the week ends in less than two hours as I type this, I’m sneaking in rather late and endeavoring not to wake anyone, like that ever works.
The initial experiment came from earlier this year, and hadn’t turned out too badly for that, but I wanted to try something a little different. I’d floated small drops of vegetable oil in water within a clear glass pan and did extreme closeups while I messed about with light sources, including diffraction from the surface of a CD. I’d tried other backgrounds, but they needed to be farther away to produce a better effect.
Thus, this evening. I fetched up an old window pane and supported it between two chairs so there was open space beneath, and put the glass pan on that. Beneath, I put a cluster of holiday lights.
I was using the Mamiya 80mm macro with extension tube to get the focus right, and because it could be used wide open so the aperture would not be shaping the bokeh. This meant focus depth was very short, which I initially thought wouldn’t be an issue; I was focusing on the oil bubble on the surface. What I found was that the bubbles themselves were one focus point, the images within the bubbles of the lights beneath were another entirely, and I had to chose one or the other.
Not only that, but if I attempted to focus on the lights within the bubbles (which were acting as little lenses themselves,) the focus distance was different depending on the size of the bubble. Keep in mind that all of these are cropped, so what I could see in the viewfinder was much smaller than this. I needed to keep the pan as still as possible because some of the shutter speeds were quite slow, and at macro magnification (the end of the lens being roughly 16cm from the surface of the water,) even slight movement could show in the image, so every time I shifted to get different bubbles, I had to let things die down for a bit. I could kick around the lights underneath to change that effect without issues, though.
In this one, you can actually make out the wires of the cluster of holiday lights simply dumped on the floor beneath the glass – but the focus is widely variable among the bubbles. What you can also see is that I inadvertently snapped the shutter just as two bubbles in the center merged, with the shutter speed being just slow enough to blur this motion.
I closed down the aperture to f16 I think for this one, and it definitely helped the bubbles appear a bit better, while it also resolved the background lights outside of the bubbles from mere color patches to more distinct blobs. This is enough to recognize, if you look very closely, that the bubbles are inverting the background image, which is typical.
But I like this one the best. Instead of trying to focus on the background lights through the bubbles, I just focused on the surfaces of the bubbles themselves, letting the images within defocus into bokeh. A strong sidelight gave definition to the bubble shapes, emphasizing the spherical aspect (or at least the appearance of such.) Now all of the bubbles are similarly focused, lessening the confusion of the image.
So overall, not bad for a couple hours work all told (yes I’m calling it “work” shut up.) I’d done some previous experiments with just the light strands themselves, significantly defocused, and one tip I can offer is that the LED lights, while departing from that yellow incandescent cast of the old ones, nonetheless put out significantly more light in the blue and purple spectrum, and thus these lights can overpower the frame. Not only that, but too fast of a shutter speed will net you a blank frame too often: alternating current causes all lights to blink on and off, generally about 60 times a second (60Hz,) but the glow from incandescent filaments doesn’t fade quickly and so the blinking isn’t captured – not so with LEDS, which switch off instantly. That’s another experiment, though I’ve already captured some initial images.
Just a brief video clip here, that I captured while after other subjects back in September – I didn’t take any still photos and the spider was in view for only a minute, so this is all I have to identify it.
My own search through BugGuide’s photos turned up nothing that looked like a good match, and I haven’t tried contacting them to find out if there’s a way to show them this video. The closest two species that I found are:
Neither of these seems correct, judging from both the pattern on the abdomen and the coloration of the forelegs; the average size of P. galathea also seems way too small. This was perhaps the largest jumping spider species that I’ve ever seen, and there was a noticeable tap when it landed on my arm; where it jumped from to get there, I can’t say, but I’d been sitting in the grass waiting for anoles to do something interesting, so it probably launched itself from my shoulder or thereabouts.
If you have any suggestions, or better yet a positive ID, you can comment here or reach me through the Contact Page, and I’ll update this post. Kindly don’t tell me that it’s an extremely rare species that you would have paid big bucks for – I’ve been having a good year.
You know, why use four digits when you can use three? I never understood that convention for Roman numerals, but then again, Arabic doesn’t make any sense either – they’re just what we’ve been taught.
Anyway, another from 2012, and it wouldn’t be hard to figure out the exact date.
There was a lot of media attention regarding the transit of Venus in front of the sun, but I’d made no plans to capture this; it was occurring in late afternoon and I had no solar filter for the camera, and wasn’t about to spend the money on something that I’d use once (well, it would have been twice at least, since I would have put it to work again with the total solar eclipse five years later.) But then as the day wore on, I saw the clouds getting thicker and occasionally obscuring the sun just enough, and set up and waited for the right conditions. I was shooting at the limits of the camera – minimum aperture and ISO, maximum shutter speed – but it worked, and I captured something that I’d missed eight years earlier and wouldn’t be seen again for 105 years, and I’ll probably miss that one too.
We’re back to another installment of living out my glory years and realizing how unglorious they were, but you take what you got, because whatcha gonna do about it now? You should have thought about needing post material a decade later back then, shouldn’t you?
Though I admit, you have no idea how psyched I was to get this image back then, and I still find it pretty damn slick, a lucky find (that I handled quite well, mind you.) It was the first year that I’d had a mantis hatching right on the property and thus incredibly handy, and I’d gone out on a particularly dewy morning to find the bebbies were all covered with dew – this is not work of the misting bottle. The azaleas that they’d chosen to scamper about on were still in bloom, as well as producing new leaves, so the background was a lot more colorful than the deeper green of the mature leaves later on in the year. I had to use the supplemental light of the big flash unit, at that time with a Lumiquest Big Bounce (which turned out to be too heavy and cumbersome for macro work, and was soon replaced by a custom unit,) but the macro magnification was obtained with the bellows – also cumbersome for field work, but more than adequate in this situation.
You’d think with the high humidity that NC typically displays, images like this would be common, but there are only two times of the year that morning dew usually occurs, in the spring and the fall, and it’s still not that common – warm to hot days and cool nights, and we transition through those periods rather quickly; all summer long we never hit the dewpoint in the evening. Generally, April and September are when these conditions appear, provided we’re not getting the rains that come then instead.
Although it helps if I’m actually around to see the dew, because clear skies will burn it off quickly, so it’s usually gone soon after the sun is up. You could say I’m not a morning person, but you’d be wrong – I’m always up in the early morning. I just usually consider it the previous day still…
Being a pop musician is not, it appears, a stable career choice, and cataloging the various iterations involved in this one would take more effort than I’m going to expend – Wikipedia exists for this reason, but I grew up before cut-n-paste was a thing and learned how to write my own essays, so I’ll just send you over there if you want all the nitty-gritty. And I admit that I was late to the party on this one, not really discovering the primary band until after they’d disbanded.
While the initial aspects had a long history before this, it was as Oingo Boingo that they gained their primary popularity, a pop/new wave group with a lot of members, which is the only increment that can be used dependably – I think the lineup changed by the song. One of the things that set them apart was how much you realized there were a lot of people in the band, because most of the songs were a kaleidoscope of instruments and sounds and stings and flourishes, but exceptionally well mixed like the dialogue in a character-heavy movie, never overriding one another. The horn section, found wandering the streets destitute after the end of the disco era, were given a new home and a big yard to play in, while multiple keyboardists got to try out many of the newer synth sounds being produced in shadowy computer dens.* And Danny Elfman became the primary singer and songwriter, after the band (and before that, the street-theatre group) was initially created by his brother Richard.
My first introduction to them was from the soundtrack of the movie by the same name, so we’ll have a listen to ‘Weird Science.’ Note the spooky little three sustained notes from the keyboards lending character to the lyrics, but especially pay attention to the classic guitar riff following the chorus, which is actually two guitars playing the same thing very slightly out of sync – easiest to hear if you have headphones on, because they’re on different channels (I entertained the possibility that this was simply a duplication of one riff, but they don’t seem to be perfect clones.) I want to see the sheet music that delineates all of this:
Weird Science – Oingo Boingo
I’m not sure if you could, or should, consider this ‘typical’ of the band – I’m not sure anything is, really, because they tackled a variety of styles while still within the confines of ‘pop music.’ But it’s distinctly catchy for something with such a melange of things going on in there.
More along these lines is the next, but there’s a caveat: this song was never performed the same way twice, and I have no count of how many different versions there are, except that this one is my own – I happened to like certain progressions of the lyrics and ended up remixing this myself. I don’t recommend this, because you’ll discover that no two sources have the same tonal quality and trying to match them seamlessly isn’t a healthy undertaking. However, the numerous versions almost guarantee that any live performance you see is actually performed live, and not lip-synced, because you won’t find a recording that matches it.
Back in the early 2000s when I was shooting weddings in Florida, a local radio station would play this fairly dependably on Saturday nights, and I’d catch it as I was driving back home from gigs, sweat drying in the blast from the open windows. Wedding photography (at least to me) required being ‘on’ the entire time, not necessarily tense but certainly riding a regular stream of adrenaline to remain on top of everything, and grooving to this song would burn off the remainder – that’s probably not biologically accurate but you still know what I’m talking about. It’s slightly amusing that the song is about funerals, so let’s check out ‘Dead Man’s Party’:
Dead Man’s Party – Oingo Boingo
Elfman shows off his falsetto range here, yet they had to dig a hole below the basement to tune that bass. Many popular songs have a recognizable riff, but this has nine or twelve of them – I would have loved to have seen the studio sessions as they hashed all this out. Such complication is easy to do in the studio (more or less, anyway,) but the band could and did routinely produce this live, with just as much detail. You can see it in this performance, and I have to say, this is typically what the band looked like, most of them having just gotten out of classes while the horns have come back from three different bar mitzvahs (b’nei mitzvah, fuck you,) and Elfman is wearing his grandpa’s clothes.
There are a lot of songs to be found out there, before they broke up, and none of them is a straightforward love song – many of the themes are fairly dark in counterpoint to the tempos. Elfman can look especially creepy at times, which I suspect he realized and preyed upon, but it might also indicate an aspect that helped him in some later works – more shortly. Right now, we have another of my favorites from their heyday, probably the most ‘mainstream’ of their compositions.
We Close Our Eyes – Oingo Boingo
If you’ve picked up any pattern from the songs that I feature, one of the biggest criteria is a singer that can seriously vocalize, and Elfman certainly counts. This is a song that can embarrass you at the stoplights, because even lip-syncing puts on a show. If it happens, open the windows and crank it – you’ll find a kindred spirit. Besides, fuck’em anyway – they probably can’t even use their turn signals.
After Oingo Boingo disbanded, Elfman did a bit of solo work, but was soon asked to compose the soundtrack to Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, and is now well-known for producing some more recognized things like the theme from The Simpsons and the soundtracks to Batman, Men in Black, and The Nightmare Before christmas, where he not only recorded all of the songs sung by the Jack Skellington character, he did the dialogue as well, though for reasons unknown he was replaced for the speaking parts. As a composer for movie scores, he rivals John Williams, and I have no idea how many songs he’s written over his career, but it may number in the thousands.
Yet here’s one you might not know, appearing on the official soundtrack to Beverly Hills Cop yet not heard in the film – it was added to the soundtrack release, I believe, to garner attention to Elfman as a solo artist even though most of Oingo Boingo is actually performing on the track, and the complicated rhythms and fills are retained (catch the baum baums and ditditdits.) The soundtrack is where I found it – a pretty strong soundtrack overall even if it isn’t Elfman’s work – but the song itself can also be found on Elfman’s So-Lo album. This is ‘Gratitude.’ Or is it?
Gratitude – Danny Elfman
All this, from a guy that was rejected from his elementary school orchestra “for having no propensity for music.” Oh. Well, it seems I can cut-n-paste at times…
I actually use this image in my introductory nature photography seminar, as an example of what not to do, and also as a kind of penance. Initially it might look like an okay portrait of a sandhill crane (Antigone canadensis,) though it quickly becomes clear that it could be a lot better. The background is cluttered and complicated, and too close in focus to the crane itself. It’s not quite perfectly centered (which is generally boring – it should be off-center at least a bit more.) The trash throughout the grasses is hideous, but not half as hideous as the pole sticking out of the bird’s head! I am ashame.
In my defense, it was the first shot that I fired out the car window as we pulled up alongside a pair of the cranes right at the roadside in Florida, the ‘proof’ frame you get when you’re not sure if the animals will let you get anything more before they flee. I would have deleted it long ago, but it’s serving its purpose right at the moment.
And it must be said, I got the follow-up image only moments later, doing it a bit better this time.
Not exciting, but given the opportunity and conditions, probably the best I was going to get, and markedly improved. The clutter is gone, and while the background is not deeply out of focus, it is indistinct enough that the sharp crane stands out. The pose is a bit more interesting, not flat to the camera but giving a little depth and ‘personality’ – you get the feeling something interesting is happening just to your left. I boosted contrast just a hair to bring out the green better.
Neither of the pair was inclined to move from the spot, and were only stalking around in a very small area, quite close to the road, in a casual, bored manner. But after a moment, we discovered why they were hanging out.
Almost invisible among the verge, a baby sandhill was remaining inconspicuous, the adults not even seeming to notice it there, which kept it from drawing attention. While we had been hesitant to leave the car for fear of spooking the adults, even though it would mean better photo opportunities, finding the nestling clinched it: getting any closer would be a bad idea. After all, sandhill cranes stand about 150cm tall and have a beak that is at least 8 – not something you want defending its young from you.
Now, why this spot for nesting, I cannot say – it’s not like Florida doesn’t have plenty of better spots for a nest than within 5 meters of a road. Initially, I’d found that sandhills breed in the Canada, which made this even more out of place, but it appears (from the map) that some stay in Florida all year long.
Though it’s gonna be a while before I beat the image at the above link…
Back in 2011, I’d planted a whole bunch of wildflower seeds and, very typically I was to find out, almost none of them sprouted. At all. The only one that I could dependably say did was some form of aster, but it fulfilled its purpose in that it attracted a certain number of pollinators, and with them, a certain number of pollinator-predators. This is one of them, a jagged ambush bug (genus Phymata.) I couldn’t get any closer to the species than that back then, though now I suspect it might be one of the Phymata americana species, and if you go to that link, you’ll find the manners of differentiating them, which will require me to learn a bunch of new arthropod anatomical terms and then see if I captured any of them in the images. Maybe later.
The image is faintly soft, because it’s highly magnified, and judging from the timeframe, this was done with the newly-obtained macro bellows – I was figuring out what worked best, and settled on other options. Still, it’s enough to see the intricate detail of the species, which is about the size of a blowfly, or a little smaller than a honeybee. I could get away with this from a ‘field’ image (unrestrained and as-found) because ambush bugs sit very still to not attract attention. Most arthropod subjects would be diddybopping around and making it nigh impossible to use something as specific and hard-to-focus as a bellows arrangement, so this was a good test. Ya gotta love that space samurai armor…
Take a close look at the eyes, though. Ambush bugs have compound eyes like most insects, with the false pupil aspect, but their eye anatomy produces a strange bullseye pattern from the false pupils. This kind of thing makes me aware again that biologists have dissected these eyes, somehow – I’m trying to imagine how you do this and what you use, given that the bits are nearly microscopic. But it’s safe to say that I have enough frustrations and won’t be attempting this anytime soon myself.
In case this is a little too eye-bending, this is my own hand dipping into an absolute buttload of tadpoles – we needed a spring image in here at least once. This was from back in 2011 at a local park, and the pond was small, but not that small – the tadpoles had instead followed the flow into an area where they couldn’t easily swim back out again, and so were queuing up a bit. These are likely American toads (Anaxyrus americanus,) and I can tell that by the number of vertebrae in the tails. No, I lie – I’m not even sure they have vertebrae in their tails – but judging from the time of year and the past observations of this pond as a breeding ground for the species, it’s a fairly safe bet.
It’s a lot of tadpoles, but then again, just about everything in the area eats toads, so it works out; species with high retribution rates before adulthood tend to produce a lot of offspring to account for this. Which makes me wonder: do amphibious species with more significant defensive mechanisms, like the poison dart frogs, produce fewer offspring because they have a higher survival rate? Do they have a higher survival rate, or are they too confident in their badass reputations and die instead from being stupid, like taking selfies on cliff edges? Inquiring minds want to know…
With heavy rains the other day, I stuck some watering cans out on the porch railing to fill. Naturally it stopped raining soon after that, and later on I glanced out there to find I’d collected only about a centimeter of water. But in one of them was a dead beetle, which I found curious, becoming more curious when I discovered that it wasn’t dead at all, but a live diving beetle that had, accidentally or purposefully, found the minimal water in the can. This gave me a new subject to tackle, because I didn’t recognize it.
Unlike some others that I’ve caught, this one was fairly cooperative in holding still near the glass of the aquarium, allowing me to play around with effective lighting. After no small amount of poking around on BugGuide.net, I determined this was likely an Acilius abbreviatus, a type of predatory diving beetle, though it lacked the distinct proboscis of the Belostomas, the most common one that I find around here. It also had more oar-like hind legs, and lacked the prominent hunting forelegs.
Unfortunately the sand that I used as a substrate in the macro aquarium had a lot of chaff and silt in it, possibly old pollen, and this never really settled out of the water, but adhered to the beetle and prevented nice clean shots. Which means I have to wash my sand before I tackle things like this again, not a routine chore I ever imagined I’d have to do. Hot or cold water? How many rinse cycles?
We needed a look at the anatomy of those propelling hind legs, with hairs that I imagine lie flat when the beetle is out of the water. How much time they spend either in or out I can’t say, but this is a full adult and has wings, so at the very least they can travel between water sources easily, which is how this one found the watering can. I don’t imagine too much else did – I certainly didn’t see anything except some pine straw and a leaf – so it wasn’t the best choice for food sources, and neither was the macro aquarium, but I released it into the backyard pond after I got my shots. Now all it has to do is avoid the frogs therein.
But of course I was after the portrait shot while I was at it.
That’s ordinary fine Carolina beach sand in there, so you know we’re magnifying quite a bit – the overall length of the beetle was probably 10-12mm, so the space across the eyes here is less than 3mm. Adorable, isn’t it? Certainly seems more welcoming than the Belostomas, but that’s not hard to do.
It’s funny how much prep time it takes to get these kind of images, though. Macro aquarium propped up on a box to raise it higher, out on the back porch table, with a bright LED desk lamp for focusing. Time for any sediment to settle out of the water for clear(er) shots. Tripod pulled right in front of the table, with the macro flash rig and the AC power source for it (used whenever I can, which is virtually always ‘studio’ work.) Two different macro lenses, and a lot of lighting tests to see if the angle and strength are adequate for the subject, and if reflections are coming from the glass, which is frequent. Occasionally probing the subject to get it towards the front of the tank again, or to turn and face the camera, with patient waits if it gets too disturbed and goes on a race circuit of the aquarium for a bit. But at least I’m not struggling to provoke the right facial expression…
We’re back to another installment of living out my glory years and realizing how unglorious they were, but you take what you got, because whatcha gonna do about it now? You should have thought about needing post material a decade later back then, shouldn’t you?
