I was off shooting in Hastings Park this evening, using the Monster Macro Rig and having a good time shooting immature insects. Everything was working as advertised, and I got a few decent shots of caterpillars, sawfly larvae and a nymphal seed bug. The beauty of this rig is that the background and subject are both lit at a tiny aperture, making motion irrelevant and achieving the look a tripod shot might.
Then the batteries in the subject light died just as I was shooting a damselfly…
Although it was not the shot I intended, I am pretty pleased with the result! This is the type of thing that gives me just the boost I need. Maybe I will try a series of silhouettes next.
The photos I took Sunday of the pretty Habronattus males were fun and effective because of their simple composition. This is not a difficult look to achieve, and only requires a diffused flash and a white surface. This is a technique I use often as a shortcut to isolate a subject, and it looks pretty nice!
For these shots, I was shooting on a white formica table, but I have used just a blank sheet of typing paper as well. I just placed the spiders on the table, brought in a diffused flash (YN-560 with the Cheapskate Diffuser Mk II) at 1/8 power, and blasted away at ISO 250-320 at f13. I used a 100 mm macro lens with 37 mm of extension tubes. The exposure I brought up in post so that most of the background goes to white (overexposed on all channels) then reigned in the subject using the blacks slider in Adobe Camera Raw. Often using this technique I get loss of contrast due to the light reflecting off the large white surface directly at the front element, but so long as it is not to severe, this can be brought back in post.
Setup: white sheet, attractive subject, blast light from your favourite angle! Done!
While environmental portraits showing the habitat or behaviour are great and something to work at, you can try this as an easy way to document a subject in isolation when you need a good quality image. The way I look at it is as a convenient visual shorthand that conveys the physical appearance of a subject with no distraction, much in the same way that fashion photographers or catalogue photographers use the same technique. I used this to add some good images of Habronattus ophrys (which is very difficult to shoot in situ) to bugguide.net. I think they turned out nicely, and show how beautiful some of our local spiders can be. What do you think?
This weekend expedition, I put out the call for our lab members to join me in a trip to Iona Beach, which is just bustling this time of year with all kinds of wonderful creatures, especially some wonderful spiders. I was joined by Catherine Scott, Samantha Vibert, Matt Holl and Nathan Derstine from our lab, and the newly-minted Dr. Gwylim Blackburn of UBC. We were heavily loaded with spider experts, as Catherine studies the western black widow, Sam has studied the hobo spider, and Gwylim is an expert in salticid behaviour and evolution. Luckily for us, Iona Beach was a field site for both Samantha and Gwylim, so they knew the good spots to find the best spiders.
A chrysidid seeks bee nests to parasitize
A male Yellow-headed Blackbird. This population at Iona Beach is a very disjunct coastal population of a normally Interior bird.
A male Salticus scenicus (Zebra Jumper). Look at his amazing chelicerae!
Sam enjoys the Yellow-headed Blackbird
We checked out the progress on the new Wild Research banding hut.
Gwillim and Catherine searching for Habronattus ophrys.
Nathan scans the ground carefully. H. ophrys is very elusive!
A beautiful Philodromid (running crab spider) under an aster.
At the end of the day, I did some studio shots with the Habronattus ophrys and the Habronattus hirsutus, as the first one at least has very poor photo documentation.
Photos from the Honduran Conservation Coalition website.
I received an email last night from Mark Bonta, a researcher with the Honduran Conservation Coalition, alerting me to some big news from Honduras! A nest of the Red-throated Caracara was found by Isidro Zuniga, a researcher with the coalition in the pine forests of Olancho province. This is a sparsely-populated region of dense forests and rugged mountains which is filled with a multitude of fascinating plants, animals and habitats. You can read the press release from this morning here.
This is big news for raptor biology in general, as it is only the fifth Ibycter americanus nest found by researchers in the world, and the very first from Central America! Not only that, but on a personal note, it means that there are actually other researchers taking up study of my very favourite bird. The Red-throated Caracara was only recently re-discovered in Honduras, by Narish and Jenner in 2004*, also from Olancho. This could mean that there is a stable population of this species in these pine forests, and gives some hope for its continued persistence. For too long this species been neglected by science, despite its fascinating biology, and the fact that it has been nearly extirpated from much of Central America. Now, with sightings in Nicaragua, and this recent discovery in Honduras, I think there is cause for hope for research into the conservation issues for these birds.
In fact, in the press release, the Honduran Conservation Coalition, in partnership with the Peregrine Fund and others state that this is the start of a concerted research effort. The preliminary information is a but a teaser of things to come, and when these data become available they will add greatly to the known biology of the species.
So far, we know that Mr. Zuniga spent six weeks observing the nest, recording prey deliveries and nestling care. The nest was in a pine tree, although from the video it is unclear whether the nest is constructed by the birds or is just a platform on a broken tree (the two nests we have found in French Guiana used a bromeliad as a nesting platform, with no nest material brought by the adults). Only a single chick was being reared, which accords well with our findings in French Guiana.
The nests we found in French Guiana were in large epiphytic bromeliads, which are in short supply in the pine forests of Olancho. What could they be nesting on?
There is also some video of the nest, with footage of adults and the young bird.
I am really excited by these findings, and I eagerly look forward to learning more. How many adults brought prey? What was the nest made of? What kinds of wasps were they preying on? What types of fruits, if any would they find in the pine forests?
All these questions will no doubt be answered in time, and as always, I will be eager to learn more about this awesome bird!
*Narish AJ., Jenner T (2004) Notes on the Red-throated Caracara, Ibycter americanus in Honduras. Cotinga 22: 100.
These images show the Elderberry Longhorn Beetle (Desmocerus aureipennis), and the subtle effect of using a bounce card to add fill to a side-lit subject. Of these two, I think the once without the card is nicer.
One of the cheapest lighting modifiers to use is a handheld white surface, often called a bounce card, to direct fill light toward a subject. When the light source is the sun, or a small speedlight, this is said to be effective for filling in unsightly shadows and flattening the exposure somewhat for a more pleasing appearance. It is a fine idea for people, but what about insects? Will bouncing back some of that diffused key light greatly improve the appearance of a photo? I did some experimentation to find out.
In the following series of frames showing a Silphid beetle (Sexton Beetle) of the genus Nicrophorus, the key light is a speedlight diffused with the Cheapskate Diffuser MK II, and the bounce card is placed directly beside the subject to the right.
In the frame on the right, the structure of the thorax is revealed in more detail by the bounced light from the reflector.
On the bare rock, the subject’s shadow is softened by the bounce card.
And here, with a bit of a key light error, the harsh shadow is undone by the bounce card, revealing detail on the head (but not enough to save the frame!).
In these next two frames, the diffused key light is also above and to the left, a second bare speedlight (in the Monster Macro Rig) lights the background, and the bounce is directly below the subject.
In this case, the effect is to flatten the exposure of the foreground, somewhat muting the effect of the angled key light. I prefer the frame on the left, even though the exposure is somewhat off.
OK, so with a bounce card in the bag, what else can we do?
Well, it can make a nice instant white background, changing this:
Into this:
Check out all those mites!
All in all, the effect of the bounce card seems to be rather subtle in most cases, but may be useful for filling harsh shadows in a way that avoids the dreaded double highlights of using fill flash (especially in the eyes of the subject). Because it is cheap and light to carry, I think I will keep it in my photo bag, but will probably be judicious in its use. I think it is probably only suitable for things that don’t fly too readily!
I am sure I am just scratching the surface of using a card to bounce fill onto a subject, but I am itching to show you more of these beautiful beetles.
Yesterday I dragged out the Micro Aquaria and a dollar store net to see what I could find in the pond at Hastings Park. This little park is a bit of an oasis for me, featuring a real live pond, some nice vegetation, and an eagle’s nest across the street. It was actually a bit less seething with life than I’d hoped*, but there was quite a bit to keep me occupied for a few hours.
The damselflies were abundant and quite pretty.
I was interested that the black and white striping is actually banding on the tracheae.
This one nears eclosion, with well-developed wing buds.
A lovely backswimmer! Note how the dorsal surface faces down and is light colored, while the ventral surface is dark and faces up.
A water boatman at rest on the bottom. You can see the “plastron” bubble on the ventral portion of the abdomen that is the gas exchange structure employed by this insect.
At the end of the day, I think I really need to refine my techniques for aquatic photography. There are some people who can do it really well; for an example, check out Jan Hamrsky’s photostream. I really miss the saturation and clarity you get with the air-to lens interface. I will work on this over the summer, in between the thesis, grant and job search…Keep posted, and I will keep posting!
* I did find a waterscorpion, bit of course this was far too large for my aquaria!
The first image I uploaded to flickr: June 16 2005, a crop of a shot of a yellow rat snake I had taken the day before with my trusty HP Photosmart 735. I found it behind the Florida Medical Entomology Lab, where I did my Masters.
Last week, on the 20th of May, flickr announced and rolled out extensive changes to their layout and business model. These have caused a massive uproar in the flickr community; at least among those who have been long-term paying members, of which I am one. I came of photographic age on flickr, and I feel that the new model is hostile to the community that fostered my photographic education.
It appears that the new business model is set to sacrifice their dedicated core photo enthusiast user community (which includes such notable efforts as sourcing images for Encyclopedia of Life and the Neotropical Birds website, among others) to focus on drawing in everyone with everything related to digital storage of media. The aim seems to be shifting from a user-pays service model for their core finance, and into ad-supported massive online hosting of media. How this will play out in terms of obtrusiveness of ads and crappiness of product placement I cannot say. I am personally not a fan of their new layout and formula for making money, and even my decent little laptop has major issues trying to load their massively over-filled and endlessly-scrolling pages.
The new layout could be described as overwhelming…
All that grumbling aside, there is a positive spin that we might make use of for Cheapskate Tuesday! As part of their plan, flickr now offers any member, paying or not, 1 terabyte of FREE storage. The implications of this for remote backup and access are obvious, as 1 TB of jpegs is a hell of a lot of pics. I already use flickr as a backup of sorts, and in fact in my early days, I had very poor data management skills, so my only copies of some shots are on flickr. With 1 TB of storage, I could upload my entire collection of jpegs, and in fact I may do so some time.
If you are uncomfortable with ads, and want to beat Yahoo at their own game, you could backup your entire collection and set the default viewing to private, so that they won’t be out slanging Creation Museum tours or butt hair remover on your hard work. The new model will probably attract a ton of crap photos from casual phone snappers; let them do the dirty work for Yahoo while you take advantage of your free terabyte!
Anyway, this is only a good plan as far as Yahoo sticks to its end of the bargain, and with the massive changes sprung without warning last week, I am not so sure that is a safe bet.
The most recent image I have uploaded to flickr: a Cellar Spider brooding eggs (yes, that one! We are so excited!)
This Weekend Expedition was an important working trip, to collect wild stock for Catherine’s western black widow colony. Catherine studies the sexual communication of these beautiful spiders, and requires wild stock to work on. The purpose of this trip was to collect adult females, as well as egg sacs to give the annual boost that her colony requires. We set out Sunday morning to Island View Beach on the Saanich Peninsula of Vancouver Island to turn over logs and search for a hidden treasure of Latrodectus hesperus.
On the ferry ride over, Catherine begrudgingly shared her breakfast with some gulls.
And became a big star!
Providing some close up views of gulls flying over water!
Island View Beach
Catherine explains the double pocket technique: load one pocket with empty vials, and transfer to the other as you collect the spiders.
Jeff and Chloe search a log
Devin traversed the dunes.
A rare overwintered male black widow. It is darker than ones reared in the lab.
A not-yet-adult female black widow.
Black widows were not the only spiders we found of course. Here is a female hobo spider with her egg sac.
Termites, walking in a line. These are likely Reticulotermes hesperus, the western drywood termite. Pay attention Entomology 317 students! Driftwood filled beaches!
I am headed back to the smog-filled urban sprawl that is Vancouver… But just for 1 night. I come back to the Island Sunday for a quick day trip to collect Black Widows at Island View Beach on Sunday. Here is a shot of last year’s collection trip.
