Without even trying

Al Denelsbeck

Today is National Grouch Day (no foolin’) and in the past, I’ve had a list of ways to participate, to which I will refer you since I’m almost certain that you haven’t yet tried them all, and coming up with new ideas that are not variations of the same things is a great way to get me irritable – yes, that fits the bill, but then you don’t get to participate too, and merely observing the holiday in others is exceptionally poor spirit.

However, I have found that, inadvertently, I have stumbled upon the ways to celebrate it anyway. The first was, to simply suggest to The Manatee that he download GIMP to do some simple edits on images, which then led him to a long and frustrating process in attempting to find a version compatible with his mAcoS version, or alternately to see what it would take to upgrade his version – like me, he does not pursue the upgrade schedule that manufacturers suggest (read: try to force upon users) and ran afoul of GIMP no longer listing old enough versions through normal channels. All to just rescale (and maybe crop) some photos that I could’ve/should’ve done anyway.

Meanwhile, I celebrated it personally by once again tackling an issue that’s been bugging me – granted, this was ahead of schedule and not today, but it’s the frustration that counts, right? That saga, already in draft form this morning, lies below:

I have a semi-custom computer, a ‘mini-tower’ except it’s not all that mini, which has all of the extras that I use regularly: multiple hard drives for backups and countless projects, memory card reader, programmed gaming mouse with custom functions, and so on. And one of the things that’s been bugging me, for a long time now, has been the external speakers.

I don’t use them that often (mostly headphones,) but there are times when it’s seriously handy to have them. And at some point after switching over to Ubuntu Studio as my operating system, I realized that the left speaker wasn’t functioning. And this began a seriously long saga that I’m now going to relate as a lesson.

The first thing was, the headphones worked fine on both channels/ears, so it wasn’t a mono/stereo setting. And I bumped out the plug part way from the back of the unit and got sound from the left speaker. So far so good. Then I started playing.

I went into everything about Ubuntu and sound management that I could, and nothing fixed it. I tried switching speaker sets, and got the same result. I ordered another sound card (since I’d been using the onboard, built-in one) and tried that out. Same result. Had to be something in the sound drivers.

Now, Linux and Ubuntu are notoriously bad about handling sound, for unknown reasons, and still have a legacy sound handler called Pulseaudio that is widely recognized as shit – why Ubuntu Studio (which is specifically aimed towards music, video, and image editing) installed this damn thing, I’ll never know. The replacement for this software package is Pipewire, and I’d installed it, but never got it operational. Still, I had to suspect that Pulseaudio was doing something that it shouldn’t.

So I spent a couple of days (off and on, of course) trying to get Pipewire properly installed and operational, with conflicting instructions available. Several times when I thought I had it, I ran a check and Pulseaudio was still the default sound program. After much fucking around, I finally got Pipewire working and Pulseaudio off.

And yet, still no left speaker. So I disconnected the speaker set and connected them instead to another computer, and lo and behold, the left speaker failed there too. Now, bear in mind that, right near the very start of all this playing around, I’d backed the plug out and gotten the left speaker working, albeit from the right channel, but working. Fine, okay, pulled out the original speaker set and tested those on the other computer. They worked fine in both channels.

Plugged those back into my computer, and no left channel. Somewhere in the past, I’d removed the new sound card since it hadn’t seemed to be the solution, and two sound cards was confusing Ubuntu (especially since the headphones were going through the front port, so the onboard card.) Nonetheless, I dug it back out, installed it, and disabled the onboard sound card. And now both channels were working fine!

The lesson here is that, after finding the first speaker set worked if I backed the plug out, I switched them with another set, without running full diagnostics in order. Both the left speaker connection on the onboard sound card and the left channel on the second set of speakers were bad – I just dodged the step that would have revealed this by swapping things at the wrong times.

The takeaway: Do things one step at a time, in order, repetitively if necessary, to be sure of your diagnosis. In part, I swapped speakers at the wrong time (a working set for a non-working set,) and in part, I wasn’t thinking of the coincidence of both the sound card port and one of the speaker sets having the exact same failure point.

Now, in doing this, the headphone port on the front stopped making good contact, after much fussing a few months back to replace it too, so now more replacement parts are on order. Worse, that front panel comes from the onboard sound card, and I think it has to since it’s custom-wired and all that shit. I have had extremely bad luck with the onboard cards on this motherboard (the video, the network, and now the sound card have all been bypassed by using PCI cards because they’ve all been undependable.) So I’m not thrilled about having to re-enable it to have working headphones. I’ll be looking into avoiding this somehow – unfortunately, the speaker set that I’m using, while featuring a desktop power switch and volume control, does not have a headphone port built into it like some.

But some better news: Curious about just where the second speaker set was dropping out the left channel/speaker, I popped it open and did some basic diagnostics, in meticulous order this time. The desktop left and right speakers plug into the main, ‘woofer’ portion that sits under the desk, via a standard 3.5mm stereo plug, so that’s where I started. Doing the same ‘backing out’ trick I did indeed get detailed sound from the left speaker, so the speaker itself wasn’t blown, but this could mean either the connection or the sound itself (since backing it out only forces it to contact the right speaker connection instead, and had that side gone bad, it would have been even harder to diagnose); the latter would be a component issue and likely not fixable with my current knowledge. So I checked the continuity on the socket itself on the back of the woofer unit, and it all seemed fine. Then I split open the plug on the desktop speakers, which in typical manner had been assembled and then the rubber shielding actually cast over the whole thing, meaning it had to be cut away. but I have several replacement parts of this type already – mostly, what I needed to know was which color wire went to which terminal on the replacement plug, which simply cutting the wires wouldn’t tell me. Once determined, I soldered the wires to the replacement plug and bam!, all speakers working correctly now.

This unit has a headphone port right on the remote power/volume switch that extends to the desktop, but The Girlfriend wanted them so she wouldn’t have to keep plugging and unplugging her headphones into her own mini-tower, and I don’t blame her because the manufacturer of that one thought the case looked sleeker by making the port almost impossible to see, because the looks of a computer are far more important than the mere functionality of it (something that Apple embraced enthusiastically.) So I still have to re-solder a new headphone socket into my own mini-tower, when it arrives (I’ve got five on order, partially in case of another failure, mostly because it was cheap enough to up the number.) If you ask me nicely enough, I’ll be back to relate how that went!

TL;DR: No way. It’s National Grouch Day – go back and read that all from the beginning, you slack-ass.

Estate Find XXXXI

Al Denelsbeck

We have The Manatee over as a guest this week and have thus been busy doing things other than chasing critters, but I have to give him credit for finding this one, immediately upon my commenting that I needed to try and find something. Our first view comes from inside, looking out, early in the morning:

adult Carolina anole Anolis carolinensis suspended in web of unidentified funnel weaver spider Agelenidae
For reasons unknown, one window of Stately Walkabout Manor has been overtaken by several webs of funnel-weaver spider (Agelenidae,) and in one such web was sprawled this Carolina anole (Anolis carolinensis,) looking like I’d caught it in mid-fall. This was early in the morning when the night had been pretty cool, and the sun wasn’t hitting the window yet, so I wasn’t sure if the anole had somehow gotten caught in the web or simply chosen it as a hammock to snooze within the previous night. From the outside, it was much higher, and so I took a stepstool with me when I went out there.

adult Carolina anole Anolis carolinensis suspended in web of unidentified funnel weaver spider Agelenidae, from outside with reflections
I liked capturing the multiple reflections off of the double-paned glass, and we can see here that the anole is awake. The various funnel-weaver spiders in the US, unlike the funnel-web spiders of Australia, have ‘medically insignificant’ venom and so they’re not dangerous to people, though I cannot vouch for how their venom might affect an anole – or whether they’d even consider biting one rather than hiding in the tunnel attached to their web, the typical protective response. The anole’s position looks awkward, but this really isn’t any indication, since they can sleep in some pretty odd positions.

adult Carolina anole Anolis carolinensis suspended in web of unidentified funnel weaver spider Agelenidae, from outside
Once on the stepstool, I was a lot closer and could see things better, but still couldn’t determine if the anole was caught in any way. My proximity wasn’t enough to send it scurrying for cover however, and it wasn’t until I reached up and began trying to scoop it from the web that the anole panicked and fought itself free, dropping from the web to the windowsill – I’ve watched them perform similar and greater drops to no harm, since they weigh very little and absorb the impact with their legs and belly. This one scampered off and disappeared through a gap in the deck boards, so I remain unsure if the anole really intended to sleep that way or not. Either way, you have to appreciate the dynamic pose of that first silhouette.

Some spiders

Al Denelsbeck

While I have some video clips to edit together, that will take some time, and I already have these pics edited and ready to go, so we’ll have them first. Lucky us, eh?

First, we have a follow-up, rather badly outdated now, for one that was featured about a month ago. The white-banded crab spider (Misumenoides formosipes) in that post, eating well on the black knight butterfly blossoms despite being bright yellow and so about as contrasty as she could get, soon afterward changed color a bit – not to blend in any better, but perhaps it was enough to be mistaken for something innocuous.

white-banded crab spider Misumenoides formosipes perched on dying blossoms of black knight butterfly bush Buddleja davidii
I’ve seen this before: the blossoms of the butterfly bush don’t last very long, but the crab spiders like them and will hang out for quite some time, past when I would have thought any pollinators would still be visiting. And yet, I witnessed this same spider with a moth that she had captured the night following these pics, so it seems my judgment is lacking in that regard.

portrait of white-banded crab spider Misumenoides formosipes perched on dying blossoms of black knight butterfly bush Buddleja davidii
In fact, I saw this spider with a moth more often than not, and she grew quickly. Within a couple of days she could no longer be found, and I’m surmising that she went off to lay eggs. I looked, but could find no evidence of these. That was three weeks ago, so the young might be getting close to hatching, if I could only find where the egg sac went.

More recently, a new arrival on the hanging rosemary plant was found.

black-and-yellow argiope Argiope aurantia on web above hanging rosemary plant
This is right alongside the front door to Stately Walkabout Manor, but she’s not bothering anybody and stays put, so no biggie. This is a black-and-yellow argiope (Argiope aurantia,) usually called a garden spider where I grew up, but a lot of species have received that colloquial name. This is maybe about half of the size that they can get up to, which isn’t quite as big as the golden silk orbweavers, but still impressive.

black-and-yellow argiope Argiope aurantia in web, from side
It’s actually a little late in the season for this one; a few others of the same species, as well as most of the golden silk orbweavers that we had around, have vanished now – again, presumably, to lay their eggs, which is largely the end of their life cycle. Some spiders hang around to run interference for the young in a nursery after they hatch, some actually gather food for their young, but I think both of these species die soon after reproducing. Seems short to us, but it’s fairly common among arthropods.

Very close by on the adjacent camellia bush, we have the other end of the size spectrum – well, not really, but a distinct disparity at least.

juvenile Leucauge argyrobapta in web
I did a few frames in different conditions, trying to get something sharp and well-exposed, but neglected to try and get a distinct measurement until after it had disappeared, but let’s go with a body length of 2mm – it was barely even visible in the web from a normal viewing distance. I had initially and confidently pegged this as a juvenile orchard orbweaver, but as I looked that up again for the scientific name, I found I was wrong -the markings are ever-so-slightly different, and this is simply a Leucauge argyrobapta, no common name according to BugGuide.net. Very closely related, but with some subtle differences.

detail of underside of juvenile Leucauge argyrobapta
In fact, BugGuide doesn’t even list the distinctions, but those two spots on the lower rear abdomen seem to define it. Looking at the taxonomic changes listed there, it appears that this was considered an orchard orbweaver or orchard spider (Leucauge venusta,) up until 2018 when a new species was split off.

[Amusingly, that page lists the range as “Florida south to Brazil. Possibly along the southeast coast from maybe North Carolina to Louisiana.” Yet their collection of photos has examples throughout North Carolina and out to Texas – who knows what it takes to make this ‘official?’]

profile closeup of juvenile Leucauge argyrobapta
This is one of many species of spider that sits belly-up in the web, so to get this I had to be down at ground level shooting up upwards, and I waited until nightfall to get this because the daytime breezes constantly moved the web out of focus. While the abdomen might look white and overexposed here, it really is silvery, close to appearing chromed, and what this possibly does for them, I have no idea. Again, BugGuide doesn’t list a size range, but the sister species has an adult female range of 5.5-7.5mm, so presumably the same – this is definitely a juvenile. Very faintly visible here, the hindmost pair of legs has a ‘ribcage’ of longer hairs flaring out near the body, and again, what purpose this serves I cannot say. Perhaps they’re just chrome polishers…

Sitting in a film can right now, I have another, absolutely tiny spider recently caught on my desk, but this is so small that I’m going to be doing the extreme macro thing to capture any decent pics, and I haven’t tackled that yet. We’ll see how that goes…

They’re coming back

Al Denelsbeck

solitary adult male wood duck Aix sponsa trying to get up nerve to get some corn onshore
It’s been interesting watching the various wildlife that rotates around Walkabout Estates Plus, their schedules and habits, though we’ve only been here a year and so we don’t know if these are schedules. The visitors we like the most are the wood ducks, but they remain exceptionally spooky and so photos and video of them are tricky, often having to be shot through the upstairs bathroom window because they don’t like human presence anyplace where we can easily be seen.

Their first appearance last year was… well, it wasn’t an appearance, since we only heard the calls, and those started almost exactly a year ago. I managed a couple of glimpses of them over the next few weeks, but it wasn’t until well into the winter when they began visiting the main pond off the backyard, which is when we began putting down corn, and that certainly encouraged them to be coming up more often. We saw activity throughout the spring, and new broods in spring and summer, and then as the broods were getting their adult plumage in, they all but vanished, and the visits were few and far between. Still, the corn was disappearing and I suspected that early morning visits were occurring, so I got up well before first light and got the camera set up in the window. That worked.

In the spring we’d had them coming well up into the yard and were hoping to get them a little habituated to our presence, but then one of the females fell prey to a red-shouldered hawk that was also hanging around, and we felt that we might have contributed to this from our feeding habits. So now the corn only gets distributed down at the edge of the pond, while the wood ducks themselves seem to have changed their habits, since they venture up little more than a meter away from the water’s edge, and only at dawn and dusk – getting well-lit pics is going to be challenging.

The first clips, by the way, were what I mentioned in last week’s Estate Find, my potential goal, and were indeed shot on that Friday morning, though I already had the mantidfly up by then. The mob clips were obtained Sunday, and I’ve just been trying to get the time to put them together and do the voiceover since then. I get to these things eventually…

Mere trivia

Al Denelsbeck

As if most of my posts aren’t the exact same thing…

So, two purposes for this one. The first is a reminder that the Draconids meteor shower is going on right now and expected to peak tomorrow night, actually around 19:00 UTC on October 8th, which is 15:00 EDT, or 3 PM Eastern (because we’re somehow still observing this asinine clock-changing bullshit.) So okay, in the Americas, we probably won’t see much at peak unless we’re really lucky and one of those brilliant daytime fireballs occurs, but we can still be out when it gets dark enough and may see something. Will I personally get the chance? Probably not, but we’ll see.

The other purpose is to dump a few pics that won’t otherwise fit into a topic. The other day I went out to Goose Creek State Park to see if I could find anything, and the answer was, “Barely.” Really not much going on at that time, except for a handful of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) that viewed me with apparent confusion, unsure whether they should alert the authorities or not. One flipped me off with its tail as I attempted to get some captivating images.

young white-tailed deer Odocoileus virginianus swishing tail as it looks back at author
That nose came up really distinctly, like a gorilla offering a two handfuls of vanilla ice cream. Or is that just me?

When I got to the more scenic areas, the cloud cover was seriously rolling in and the light levels and color went to hell, so I was forced to skip any landscape shots. But I stumbled across an odd tableau of grasshoppers along one of the boardwalks.

trio of unidentified grasshoppers, potentially two males and one female, together on edge of boardwalk
It’s unusual to find a grasshopper that won’t leap away as you draw close, and quite rare to find a trio of them clustered together like this. I suspect that the larger one is a female, and the two smaller ones are courting males, but that’s just a guess. I also did a quick search to try and determine what species these were, but couldn’t pin it down from the photos that I got, all from this perspective. Possibly an obscure bird grasshopper, but that’s as close as I came. The sizes seem right at least.

But yeah, not a great day for activity at the park. I’d snagged this one before I left home, though:

six yellow-bellied slider Trachemys scripta scripta of varying sizes out basking on Turtle Island as the temperatures begin to drop
There’s six of them here, and they all appear to be yellow-bellied sliders (Trachemys scripta scripta.) As busy as Turtle Island was in the winter and early spring, the turtles stopped using it from late spring throughout the summer, though they’re back now. My guess is that, between the warmer water temperatures and the thicker foliage obscuring the sun more, the turtles saw no reason to be basking on the island, and were rarely found even on the logs that were receiving regular sunlight. But as the overnight temperatures dropped (and thus the water temperature as well,) they found that a good sunning session was welcome. There had been even more of them, but a few of them dropped off the island at my approach. We’ll see if we can top last winter’s record of nineteen on this little tussock.

That’s it for now; putting these up since I won’t have the video done too soon due to time constraints. It’ll get here.

Using the moon

Al Denelsbeck

So, I should be catching up with writing some posts that have images awaiting usage, or editing video, or cleaning up Walkabout Studios, or any number of other things, but instead I went out last night to use the bright moonlight for some experiments. Which turned out okay, really, and that’s better than a lot of experiments that I do, one of which is another waiting post.

The back forty of Walkabout Estates is almost entirely shrouded by trees, with only a patch near the house and over the deck that gets open sky, and that faces between straight up and a little north, so not too much direct sunlight or moonlight there either, especially as we close in on the winter months and the sun and moon get lower. The main pond gets a fair amount or sunlight, but for only half of the day, well after sunrise and into mid-afternoon before the trees again throw a lot of shade; however, many of these are the cypress which will lose their leaves/needles/whatevers pretty soon and so the light will get better. The time was right to use the moonlight on the pond, though.

portion of main pond at Walkabout Estates by moonlight
Yes, that’s all moonlight – this is 115 seconds at f8, ISO 800, and you’re looking at diminutive Duck Island to the left, with the ‘apron’ where the ducks, turtles, and nutria come onshore at lower right. At center, that little patch of brighter water separate from the main body is the channel down to The Bayou, the lower pond. Everything remains shrouded in duckweed, but the yellow cow lilies that once formed a low forest across the water have been decimated again by the beavers, I believe, though the lateness of the season may also be a contributing factor. What has me curious is that the shadowed side of the trees on Duck Island have a notable amount of light showing on them, and I’m not sure what this is from – it might be reflected moonlight from the water’s surface. Weird, anyway.

I changed perspective and focal length a little, and added an element:

time exposure of main pond of Walkabout Estates by moonlight, with author intruding into frame
I framed for both the moon and the single strand of Spanish moss that hangs down all by itself, though it was more centered than I intended (it’s really, really hard to tell when peering at the viewfinder image by moonlight, or even with the assistance of the headlamp.) I stood in the frame for about 90 seconds out of the 120, right where all the critters come ashore, and had enough of a dark background (and the lighter shirt of course) that virtually no ghostly effect took place even though I wasn’t in the frame for 1/4 of the exposure time. But this gives an idea of how far offshore Duck Island lies, and how small it really is.

I moved over a bit and aimed about 90° to the right to catch a different portion, having to change exposure significantly to do so.

time exposure of Turtle Island and portion of night sky by moonlight
Turtle Island wasn’t quite catching direct moonlight, but it’s those pale trunks visible in the center; this is now 26 seconds at f3.5, ISO 1600, done this way to prevent having star trails from a longer exposure. There are some details at the top that we need to see better:

inset of previous image, showing most of constellation Cassiopeia and a faint hint of M31 Andromeda galaxy.
I could see that the ‘M’ shape of constellation Cassiopeia was peeking almost perfectly from the branches and framed to capture that, even though a lot of the fainter stars came up brighter and made the main stars less prominent, but also captured something that I use Cassiopeia to find: M31, the Andromeda galaxy, is that fuzzy object off of the branch tips to upper right. I didn’t really expect to capture that, but I’ll take it. One of these days, I’ll manage to get it in much greater detail, but this is not bad at all for 26 seconds at freaking 10mm focal length, as wide as I can achieve with my current lens lineup.

And one more.

time exposure of back yard of Walkabout estates by moonlight
This is looking in the same direction as the first two images, just a lot further back into the yard; the thin trees of Duck Island can be found peeking between the cypress trunks just left of center. I wanted the wider angle to pick up the shadows of the trunks by moonlight, but the direct light was a little too obscured. The glow to the right, however, is where the streetlamp on the corner peeks into the backyard past the house, about the only place it does, though it shows really well in the front yard. It has a faintly ominous quality to it that I might have to play with some more.

So not bad for a few minutes of playing around, but if I’m going to do landscapes by moonlight, I need to find a more scenic spot. I imagine I can dig something up…

Estate Find XXXX

Al Denelsbeck

I had a couple of returning subjects that I could have used, and plans to try for something early this morning (about a half-hour from when this actually posts) that may or may not pan out, but I came across this one last night and knew I had my weekly subject.

First off, this was a weekly subject from last year, only back then I was doing the critters that I’d only ever photographed once, and what I’d featured had been taken 14 years before that.

unknown mantis fly probably Mantispidae
That’s the shot from 2010, one of two frames that I got before it flew off. It was a shame, because they’re cool-looking little insects, but I’d never even spotted one since. Until last night, when after a couple of terrible frames in situ, I snagged it in a film can (ask your grandfather what that is) and brought it in for a studio session.

unidentified mantisfly Mantispidae, possibly green mantidfly Zeugomantispa minuta, perched on frost aster Symphyotrichum pilosum flowers
This is a mantisfly or mantidfly, most likely a green mantidfly (Zeugomantispa minuta,) perched on a sprig of frost aster (Symphyotrichum pilosum) that I plucked for something to be perched upon. You can see where it got its name from, since it looks like a cross between a lacewing and a praying mantis, but those mantis forelegs are not an indication of any relation to mantids; this is a member of the lacewing family, and the forelegs are simply convergent evolution. We’ll see them better in a minute.

unidentified mantisfly Mantispidae, possibly green mantidfly Zeugomantispa minuta, perched on frost aster Symphyotrichum pilosum flowers
It’s also about lacewing size, a measured 12mm in body length, and I was lucky to realize what it was, since this means those forelegs require a very close observation to spot. It was dangling from a short stretch of spiderweb, and I thought that it had been captured, but it appeared to be there by choice and was not trapped at all. I’ve since found out that part of its chief diet is spider eggs, so likely it had actually discovered an egg sac suspended between branches and was polishing off the contents.

unidentified mantisfly Mantispidae, possibly green mantidfly Zeugomantispa minuta, perched on frost aster Symphyotrichum pilosum flowers
The fartsy shot with an open blossom – I just wish I hadn’t had that stray petal peeking in at the upper corner, but when you’re trying for sharp focus on something this size, you (or at least, I) don’t always notice everything.

These were all shot in the bathroom, since it’s a small space with very few hiding places, so if my subject here decided to fly off, the chances of locating it again were several dozen times higher than in the main part of Walkabout Studios. One of my prints serves as the backdrop, too far out of focus to do anything but provide appropriate color, and the sprig of frost aster is held in a clamp so I could rotate it as needed as the mantidfly wandered about. My model was very well-behaved, to its credit, except for failing to extend those forelegs for a better view – while in the studio, at least. Still, I could go in close.

closeup of unidentified mantisfly Mantispidae, possibly green mantidfly Zeugomantispa minuta
Now here’s the curious bit: Unlike the others, this frame was shot with the reversed 28-105, same rough f-stop, same lighting source, but the distinct colors of the eyes somehow got very muted, and I don’t understand why this is. The 28-105 allows me to get much higher magnification, but it’s not a dedicated macro and is, as I said, being used backwards, so there’s some optical effect going on here – I just don’t know what. Compare it to the Sigma 180mm macro, which didn’t get in as tight, but produced a distinctly different effect with the eyes.

closeup of unidentified mantisfly Mantispidae, possibly green mantidfly Zeugomantispa minuta
Now, this might be due to the much-greater working distance, which also applied to the flash softbox, but I can tell you that that starry, multi-colored effect was clearly visible to the naked eye. You can also see that the forelegs fold differently than a praying mantis, backwards and folding the same way for both joints rather than forward and reversing, ‘zig-zag’ like a mantis. The antennae are also surprisingly short.

By the way, the property here at Walkabout Estates Plus has seen a surge of blue mistflowers, and I plucked a sprig to use as the perch, thinking the pale blue-lavender color would make for great contrast to set off the mantidfly. Said mantidfly was having none of this, though, and when I attempted to coax it from the film can onto the flowers, it resolutely refused to even set foot on them and remained on the film can. Thankfully I had better luck with the frost aster, but what the issue was, I have no idea. Perhaps it just felt those clashed too much…

I kept the camera in hand when I released my subject and, sure enough, the mantidfly extended its forelegs a few times, so I snagged a couple of frames of that.

unidentified mantisfly Mantispidae, possibly green mantidfly Zeugomantispa minuta, extending foreleg after release
You get a glimpse of the serrated, ‘toothy’ edges, but then, here they seem to fold like the legs of the praying mantids. I went back and looked at the other images, and they definitely look to be folded differently. The best I can conclude is the articulation of those forelegs is astounding – makes me wish I’d been set up to do video, but out in the field this is extremely tricky at macro magnifications, and as I said, in the studio the mantidfly wasn’t showing off at all. Now it seems I have a new goal…

Follow not my lead

Al Denelsbeck

I’ve had the reminder popping up for over a week that today is International Podcast Day, and so I have for you… no podcast. Yes, yes, I can hear your sigh of relief from here. I’d strongly considered one, and had a couple of topics to talk about, but the time just wasn’t there to accomplish this. What I did accomplish was important, though, and more people will benefit from it (The Girlfriend and I) than will listen to my podcasts anyway…

However, I still have a few that I can recommend, so feel free to check them out. I find podcasts are a great thing to have on while I’m sorting photos, or working on 3D designs, or trying to fix some damn thing at my desk, and this is from some old Boomer/Gen X’er (the demarcations vary) that hasn’t bothered to stream things through my smutphone or into the car or whatever, so I’m sure you can find other activities that benefit from listening to podcasts. I provide links below, but you might also find them through your own preferred Hep Cat services.

So, Walkabout recommends, in no particular order:

The Geologic Podcast: George Hrab talks about music, odd animals, religious morons, Yes, listener questions, Yes, the gig culture, good news, and Yes. Just not geology. You’ll get it eventually.

Skeptoid: Brian Dunning’s critical analysis ‘cast eviscerates countless claims, rumors, beliefs, and broadly-accepted ‘facts’ in a meticulous and well-researched manner. The episodes and shorter than most and even have transcripts. You will learn something.

Smartless: Sean Hayes, Jason Bateman, and Will Arnett all rip on one another while interviewing their guest hosts. Good dynamic between the three and great voices for a podcast, but the first of those with interminable interruptions by sponsored messages, recorded by the trio for authenticity or some such shit like that.

Fly on the Wall: David Spade and Dana Carvey also interviewing guest hosts in between recording ads. A little too much “remember being on SNL?” but still quite entertaining.

Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend: Great dynamics between Conan and his cohosts Sona Movsesian and Matt Gourley, and a good lineup of guests. Still a lot of ads, but there are definitely times when you can hear them not taking these duties too seriously. The interview with Flula Borg (I have no idea who this is) is easily the funniest podcast that I’ve heard.

Good Hang: Amy Poehler and whoever happens to be handy, I think, interview guest hosts. I’m not too deep into this one yet, since I recently discovered it, but what I’ve heard has been good.

Ones I should be listening to (that I simply haven’t gotten around to):

The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe

Cognitive Dissonance

And naturally, my own. I haven’t been doing them much recently, but that gap has been taken up more with video – both of which require too much editing time.

By the way, it’s easy to do web searches for podcasts featuring your preferred content or topics, and many many times better than any half-ass videos featured on whatever social media horseshit that still exists, so have at it!

Was that a September, or what?

Al Denelsbeck

Somehow, these months keep ending, which someone should be looking into – I’m sure this isn’t a good thing. But while it’s happening, we’ll at least keep noting this occurrence (until we don’t, anyway) with the month-end abstract. The first was not actually intended to be an abstract as such, but it worked out quite well as one, plus it looks cool. Or at least I think so, which tells you more than you ever need to know about me.

closeup of feet of Carolina anole Anolis carolinensis sleeping vertically on twig
This was, naturally, while messing about with the new(ish) Sigma 180mm macro, and hopefully I don’t need to tell you what this is; it’s not like I’ve featured much else for the past few weeks. What I do need to tell you is how small this is, the frame spanning about 20-22mm vertically – that’s less than an inch for all the Murrikins that can’t handle metric. Meanwhile, just soak in all that scaly detail.

The second entry is the most recent, taken just before my self-imposed deadline for the abstract posts, which means this is actually posting late (not like anyone is sitting there refreshing the page at 1 AM in anticipation, but if you’re gonna set a schedule, you keep to it, right?)

green treefrog Dryophytes cinereus perched on gazing ball being cheeky
I don’t have to tell anyone what this is, either, and it’s more of a portrait than an abstract, except for the context. I’ve had a crystal ‘gazing ball’ for some time now, intending to use it when the landscapes or macro subjects were right, and decided to do some experiments tonight/this morning. This was an exercise in frustrations all by itself, which I’ll get into later, but while attempting to get a minuscule green treefrog (Dryophytes cinereus) to remain posed within the field of view of the ball, instead the little bugger leapt away everywhere, including onto the ball itself, and then had the nerve to wave at me cheekily while doing so.

That’s what fits the bill for the end of the month, anyway. I’ll be back later on with a few more pics, and to go into greater detail regarding these experiments. Just you wait.

Estate Find XXXIX (is late)

Al Denelsbeck

Actually, I was rather committed to not even having an Estate Find this week, both from not finding anything new and from having far too many other things taking up my time, but we’re pulling this one out in the last minute, kinda – it was shot in the early evening as we were rearranging things in the yard.

very young Copes grey treefrog Dryophytes chrysoscelis perched on stem of Brugmansia plant
Okay, sure, it’s simply a Copes grey treefrog (Dryophytes chrysoscelis) perched on the stem of one of the trumpet flowers (Brugmansia.) Big fat hairy deal. Except that it’s not any of those, but quite tiny – it unfortunately moved from its much more photogenic locale, nestled in like a bud at the base of the leaves, while I was getting the camera. However, I had The Girlfriend available to help provide scale:

very young Copes grey treefrog Dryophytes chrysoscelis perched on stem of Brugmansia plant, with fingernail for scale
Her finger is even smaller than mine, and we discussed how to determine that scale, but suffice to say, this is tiny, able to be mistaken for a small leaf or even a blob of mud easily.

Now, the other news, directly related, is that this was shot with a whole new (to me) macro lens, specifically the Sigma 180mm Macro f3.5 APO – a much longer reach, a little brighter view, and Sigma’s Hypersonic Motor focusing. This is a significant step up, operation-wise, from the Mamiya 80mm f4 macro (intended for the M645 line of cameras) that I’d been using before, something that I’d switched to many moons ago when my previous macro lens conked out, and stayed with because it was the sharpest damn lens I’d ever used. That one, however, began to suffer from severe stiffness in the focusing ring, and my attempts to correct this (over many months of messing about) were unsuccessful. All of the examples of the same model that I’d been finding available were either in rough shape with fungus or lens separation internally, or suffered from the same stiffness problem. So this was The Girlfriend’s present to me, and I’m hashing it out.

The biggest difference is, a much, much greater working distance to achieve the same magnification, which is nice. The HSM focusing is slick (the Mamiya was strictly manual since it dated from the 70s,) if a little twitchy, but that has a lot to do with the longer focal length and wider aperture, both of which reduce the depth-of-field when focusing – this means that it’s very easy to sway out of sharpest focus, which the autofocus has to keep up with. Even if I go manual, which will still occur (I just don’t know how often,) I have to work on being absolutely steady or, like always, tripping the shutter just as I drift into the ideal sharpness zone. There will be a learning curve, certainly.

It’s also heavy, twice the length of the Mamiya and a little greater in girth. I mean, who doesn’t want that, but it certainly drags on the arm when out wandering around, and I’ll be designing new grips for it.

The tests have been quite revealing, as well.

closeup of Carolina anole Anolis carolinensis to test Sigma 180 macro
One of the first test images taken, this is full frame, and of one of the little juvenile Carolina anoles (Anolis carolinensis) that have been so handy recently. Now let’s crop in tight:

tight crop of closeup of Carolina anole Anolis carolinensis to test Sigma 180 macro
This is at half-resolution, and you can see that even at f16, the edges of the eye are wandering slightly out of focus, but the detail on the scales atop the head is pretty damn good. Moreover, the color rendition seems somehow much more nuanced, potentially due to the advances in modern lens glass and design – I’m not 100% sure that I’m truly seeing this or if it’s simply an artifact of the camera settings and lighting, so more tests will be in order. You’ll be seeing more as we go along.

I have another example, but it’s not from this lens and so isn’t an example of that, but the new macro softbox instead:

softbox test of Carolina anole Anolis carolinensis and unidentified crab spider sleeping on dead twig
That’s with the exact same settings that I’d been using for years, and it’s actually too bright, meaning the softbox is doing a much better job of transmitting light. Actually, checking the EXIF info, the aperture is 1/3 stop smaller than my routine settings, so it’s even more light than I thought. I’ve been stopping down from the former f16 to f/22 at least, which helps increase depth-of-field.

[There’s a limit to this, however, which is discussed and illustrated towards the bottom of this page. Long story short: stopping down too far starts to soften the image again through diffraction around the edges of the aperture blades, so there’s always a limit, and you should experiment carefully to know how far you can go with your own lens. It’s usually safe to say that using the smallest aperture of the lens will actually work against you, though.]

Anyway, we have an Estate Find after all, and a little news, and more experiments and examples to come. Cool, right?

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