Living in the past VII

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, read more

Living in the past VI


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 read more

The 25 year journey of the Sigma 28-105


I mention using this lens from time to time, and I’ve gone into detail here and there, but it deserves another look, especially as we come up on its 25th birthday, more or less.

When I bought my first ‘serious,’ new camera, the Canon Elan IIe, back in 1997, I picked a pair of lenses to go along with it, using my income tax refund for the previous year. The primary lens was the Sigma read more

Macro photography, part three

I threatened earlier to return to this if you weren’t good, so you only have yourself to blame, but herewith, a quick tutorial on a method of macro photography called dark field photography.

Most times, this is used with microscopic subjects, which technically isn’t macro photography but photomicrography instead. The essence is, the visible background of the image is dark, yet the subject read more

Macro photography, part two


Earlier I talked about some of the basics, so now I’m going to introduce you to a new form of cheating (but one that may make your life oh so easier and perhaps considerably longer because, you know, stress…): captive aquarium photography.

Aquatic subjects are something that takes considerable effort to capture in the wild, and much more so if you’re after small subjects that need read more