… or the previous one, for that matter.
I’d mentioned earlier that I’d primed the yard with egg cases of the Chinese mantis (Tenodera sinensis) – seven of them, to be exact – and this morning I found the first of them had produced progeny. Unfortunately,
This one comes from fourteen years ago in 2006, with the Canon Pro-90 IS camera and a reversed Olympus 50mm f1.4 attached to the front for extreme magnification – this is what produced the circular vignetting seen in the corners of the frame. My subject here is a common jumping spider in these parts, most likely Phidippus otiosus, and is quite dead, but this allowed
There definitely needs to be a little better planning on our part, meaning we humans, because we have two major holidays that come up in winter, which is good because we need something positive to focus upon as the weather goes hyurgl, but they’re slammed close together towards the beginning of the season (in fact, there’s yet another holiday beating them both to the draw, coming
The last couple of months this year have been pretty poor for macro photography, from what appeared to be a bad birthing season to begin with, through a long drought that ended as the weather turned much colder, so subjects have been few and far between, and it’s only going to get worse from here (until it gets better again, but that’ll probably be in the spring.) So
Once again, we’re going to delve into this deal where I tell you to work on mastering something that I haven’t mastered myself – do as I say, not as I do and all that. Except, I don’t really believe that anyone masters anything in photography there are simply different levels of skill, so let’s use the word ‘improve’
As I said, it’s now time to resume my regular subject matter, but I’m not saying I’m back to normal because I don’t think I ever was. Meanwhile, I have to squeeze in just a couple more photos for this month, because the winter was so slow and because trying to beat this record is going to take some effort.
Anyway, poking around the neighborhood pond by headlamp very early
I went for a long time without anything to post, no new photos or anything, and now I have several hundred to choose from and not enough time to do anything about it. We’ll see how I fare in the next week, but it’s not looking too promising. In the meantime, we’ll do a brief Storytime post this week with a difficult capture from years ago. Turning over
In the back of my mind for a while now, I’ve had plans to show a bit more of the macro photography process, specifically some of the shooting angles and odd efforts to get the right shot, as well as a little more on the equipment. What this will require is someone else to do most of the shots, since I would be the model/demonstrator, as well as the right conditions to do this
I wanted to do this one entirely as a video, but the video clips that I had to work with ended up being too short (or, I guess you could say, I was once again too long-winded) to match up audio and video. So it’s both, a podcast covering the main details and a video to illustrate what I was talking about. I’ll get better at this soon. Maybe.
So let’s start with the audio.
I have been meaning to do this for a while now, and have no real excuse for how long it took to get to it. It took no time at all once I sat down to work on it.
This is a combination of two projects, really. The first is the macro softbox, which is still in routine use because