Re: If  I knew then what I know now…

A letter to the Flamenco-playing kid in the glasses…

Hey Kid*,

I’ve been asked to give myse…er, you something of a short head’s up on a couple of things to incorporate into your assemblage of philosophical and intellectual tools.  I will Capitalize and Bold them.  With judicious application, they should set you up for a decent swing at the few strikes that you get in your scientifically expanding three-score-and-ten.  I misse…er, you don’t seem to be headed in the directions that will expand your opportunities as you become decrepit like y…er, I have, so here is a little list. Write these down in that gray plaid notebook where you’ve filled in each square with pencil-drawn ideas for paintings, yeah, the one with the poetry for Juli K H on the black inside the cover; oh, and as a side note, paint more than one of those, will ya? Y…er, I’m gonna like the way the one you do turns out, even if you didn’t.

The first thing I want to go ba…er, for you to do is to Attend Social Functions where you are not part of the choir, band, crew, cast, etc. although parties after any such event held by those organizations will do.  Do not, I repeat, do not go or stay within two feet of a wall or doorway unless you are passing through the door. If all you risk is your own pride, Take Social Risks. Do not risk the pride or reputation of others, that is their own option. Smile when you meet people and ask their name.  Practice taking “not interested in talking to you right now” as something that happens,  like dropping your napkin; There are Other People and Other Times, you Just Keep On.   Move to another area and try again.

Plan, (yes the evil P word) Trips to Places That You Want to See/Experience, whether or not you can get anyone else to go.  Do this as often as possible; you never know when that possibility might >poof< vanish overnight.

About maintenance: you know those Lists you hate?  The ones that you have to uncrumple from that little wad when you discover that you’re not actually going to get to spend any time at the summer recreation program,  seeing anyone from school? Here’s another approach.  Take a look at the tasks on the list. Aside from the bi-quarterly moving of the firewood pile, those are all things that build up because no one is assigned to do them as ongoing chores.  If you keep your eyes open and tackle a couple of the less enormous ones for a half-hour or so each day or every other day, you will find they never become major “everything on this list has to be done before school starts in three months” items on The Lists.  Break the Task Down into Manageable Parts. You’ll wonder how it was things didn’t get done before.

I have to get going, so as a general rule for all of the interests you may develop, and you’ve heard this once from Granddad, but I see it didn’t sink in, Take the Risk of Failure, particularly in areas in which you have the most creative ideas. If this  means entrepreneurship, so be it. Find a teacher, find a mentor, but find out what you need to know to make an idea fly and risk making a buck, most people see the point in making money.  And if you fail, Study Failure Until it’s Understood, and Forgive Yourself Your Mistakes. Then, you Just Keep On again.

Oh,  just one more thing,  no matter where you are, or what you’re doing, Be There In the Ongoing Moment with all your might.  Keep your …focus.

Be happy kid,  I hope these are useful to you,

Cheers,

A friend

* we were never all that close

Gquowp-gquowp-gquowp!   For the last few days we’ve  been hearing a different call around the yard, coming at any time of the daylight hours.  I’ve spelled it as best I can there, but it’s not an utterance with which I’m familiar.  I had heard that our town had its  own complement of wild turkeys but I never thought I’d see them in such a suburban setting. The nearest strip of real woods is on the canalized creek-bed a quarter-mile away and yet, gquowp….gquowp….gquowp-gquowp, now and again.

Then came the early morning sightings out the kitchen window.  Preparing food in the kitchen for the morning feedings, checking out the window to see how low the finch’s thistle-seed feeder has gotten since the day before, when,  just outside the front door and  down between the retaining walls where the violets used to grow, a long neck and large head move cautiously forward, revealing a fairly large feathered  torso on stilts,  across onto the left-hand neighbor’s front yard.  Up along the edge of the hedge, followed openly, about four feet back,  by the right-hand neighbor’s petite tabby cat, who looks frankly astonished. Which look changes, once she sees us looking out at her, to something like “I could take that, ” as she comes back to our front walk.  The turkey, like a magic trick, vanished in the short time we were watching the cat.

We saw it a couple of times in the next few days, strutting from the right-hand neighbors, across the open cul-de-sac and up the driveway du jour to vanish into thin air, somehow, when it reached a house.  Then it seemed to have gone from the neighborhood.

Until this afternoon, gquowp….gquowp…gquowp..mumbling a couple of feet to the left of the backyard glass door.  Still looking for other turkeys, I guess. I went and got the camera, hoping to get a good shot, but when I returned it had, yes, vanished, so I hurried out the front door to catch it coming down the side driveway. Peeked around the corner: nothing.  Went all the way around the house the other way: nothing. Then, faintly, gquowp! Gquowp…gquowp.  I went back around front, looked ’round the yard and found nothing.  Gquowp-gquowp-gquowp-gquowp-gquowp!  Oh, the sound was from something taller than I am, and there was the turkey, on the ridge of the garage, neck extended, calling and looking for other turkeys. I took a couple of shots, until it seemed uneasy. I backed away onto the porch, checked exposures quickly and went back, hoping for a closer shot or a preening or wings-extended shot. No turkey on the roof, but there it was, at the bottom of the front garden walking up across the neighbor’s lawn, on its way to vanishing again.   If I didn’t know better,  I’d swear the thing teleports!

I hope I get some more tries, it’s a tricky critter!

Has the early spring brought you new visitors this year?

Cheers,

pete

Oh…the weather outside’s disgusting,

I can hear my knee-joints rusting,

so it’s here inside I’ll grumpily remain,

let it rain, let it rain, let it rain.

With apologies to Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne for fiddling with their classic.

I’m staring out the window at a medium waterfall that earlier was the downspout-less end of the  eaves trough.  It’s overflowing.  The narcissus and daffodils in front and in back of the house resemble a lost colony of colorful morning-after fraternity row students, crashed face down all over the yard where an overindulgence of rain has left them ’til they dry out a bit.  The last few days of seeing them up and alert seemed to promise a return to getting out into the yard with a camera.  Meanwhile, I’m thinking drab little scattered thoughts, as disciplined as a herd of cats, so I am going to post some spring-like pictures, photographic and fractographic, to keep my anticipation going, although some of these need to be re-taken using  better eyes.

Translucent petals on flowers alway make me want to saturate an image with their color. To that end, closeups taken from in front of (in some cases inside of) the flower with the sun or a pair of flashes lighting it from behind, can bring out shades not seen in reflected light shots.

Bright direct light may help penetrate translucent flowers, but it’s hard, flat quality is not really very attractive, as can be seen on this skipper having a midafternoon snack on some dwarf asters.  The light is unflattering on the flower and creates such contrast that the relatively middle-toned brown of the butterfly, lit from the other side, looks much darker than it actually is.

Early morning and late afternoon light ‘rules’, in photographs.  Being down in a valley between two ranges of coastal hills, we don’t get as much of a chance at the rich tones of early evening sunlight as I’d like.  When the sun is rolling downslope to retire it has to find gaps in the hills, and in rooftops and dense small trees, to have the tones of ’sweet light’, golds, peaches, pinks, reds and purples, pervade the front yard and add warmth to photographs, such as this spotlighted miniature rose.

Picture taking has become  somewhat more difficult for me during the best time of the morning for light. Since I’ve taken over the feeding of the outside critters, I have to wash the various oils and residues off  of my hands before handling anything, and the skittish eaters outside will abandon ship if I come back out after going in to wash and fetch gear.  That’s one advantage of having the good old ‘fractal camera’ on the desk.  A walk through the fractal garden is virtually limitless exploration.  Depending on one’s choices,  you may find something that leads to the forming of a blossom, such as this multilayered spiral…

or, some other structure out there in the mathematics might allow you to tweak a spiral with formulae that alter form, and a palette customized for what you feel like applying to what you found, giving you an imaginary nibble on some variety of what seems to be a broadleaf cousin of the blueberry.

Mmmm, blueberries.  Goodies from the garden, bounty of the raised bed.

To get a close-up, or do “macro” work in  the fractal math world, you can “zoom in” or “zoom out” mathematically.  In fact, the ability to expand the math of the default size fractal is so great that an equivalent  would be expanding the area of the fractal on your screen to several times the size of the known universe.  It takes a very long time to calculate at that depth, though.

For garden things in the real world, a macro lens can help explore things that are familiar in ways that make what you see a little unexpected. Even just getting to life-size on your camera’s sensor,  allows a much more detailed, up close and personal adventure.  Getting a bug’s-eye view of the world can be pretty interesting.  Sometimes, because of the characteristics of optics, you see structure not immediately apparent to the normal viewpoint. This salsify blossom, when you hold it up and look at it, sort of resembles a giant dandelion. Taken with a macro lens and natural lighting, limiting your depth of field, gives you a  cross section of the framework (The same thing happens if you try to photograph a dandelion with a small depth of field).  If you look closely at this salsify seed-head (click to see larger), you can see the tiny fibers that  hold the radiating ribs of the seeds’ parachutes. Cool, eh?

I miss having salsify in the yard, both for the photographic fun and for the delicious roots, although the plant parts are a skin irritant. Sauteed with butter, the roots  are a delicate oyster flavor; leading to the common name of ‘oyster plant’.

It’s fun to think of the Spring to come and the [at last!] reloading of fractal software with which to fiddle.

However, it’s still raining. The eaves are still a waterfall and the Big Fish in the other room needs its tank netted out, so I’ll get to work and try to wait as patiently as this little fella on the central California coast.

Waiting out the rain,

Cheers,

pete

Just a quick post, inspired by Bean’s post on February third about the I ♥ Faces contest themed, “the Eyes Have It.”   It is also a lesson about Seeing when you are looking through a viewfinder. And making spare copies of prints you like.

I had a particular photograph in mind to enter into that contest.  It was one I took when my sister’s silver-tipped Persian was alive. He had just been bathed, and being a small kitty under all that fur, was peering over the rim of the tub with such a look of hurt and utter betrayal;  I took his picture from bathtub-rim height and it turned out quite well.  I didn’t find out that the only print was no longer here until after the contest’s closing date. (Lesson: make extra copies to file, ya never know). I’ll need a negative scanner, a real one, soon.

While looking for that picture I brought out more slides to scan, (please forgive the dreadful resolution in these scans, it’s as good as I can get out of this scanner)  as I’m trying to digitize my photo files, and came across a series of Dare, sitting in his carrier.  He loved his carrier, an ordinary particle board, wood and hardware cloth cat carrier, to go outside and remain in, lying  on its side with the door open on a small hill overlooking the humans in the vegetable garden, supervising double-digging, hexagonal layout interplanting and so forth.  Anyway, he was in the carrier in the front hall, at night, with the carrier door swung wide open and I thought it would make a good close-up; Dare looking out through the wires.

I turned off the room light, got down on the floor, put a flash well off the camera to my right and took great pains trying to see well enough, without any modeling light, to judge if his eyes and facial fur were sharp…really concentrating on the subject.  The first shot was taken with the door mostly closed

and was rather dark, even for the “abandoned kitty in a cage” look.  I liked the possibilities and decided to use a little more film on the idea.

To reflect a little bit more light into the carrier, I opened the door widely enough to position it to bounce flash in to Dare. With the room light still off, in the dark but for ambient light from way around a corner in another room, I got back down below the rim of the carrier and carefully strained my vision, to focus on eyes and fur again (with the lens closed down to get good depth of field it was VERY dark in the viewfinder), and took the shot.

At this point I’d like to emphasize something for all the photographers out there who fall in love with the subject in the viewfinder: always…always, always check everywhere in your viewfinder when you compose a scene,  especially if you’re in darkness.  I know it’s a beginner’s concept but it bears repeating, or, in my case, tattooing inside my eyelids. I know I’m not the only one with unicorns made of a subject plus a stick, a sign, or a lamppost unnoticed in the background.  I, for example, had never paid much attention to anything but the function of the cat carrier and in the dark, thought nothing of bouncing light off the inside of the door, which I’d never really examined…it’s just particle board, after all.

Well, with this bounced-flash shot, I discovered the manufacturer’s mark for the first time. Sigh.

Check those viewfinders!  *Grin*

Is it possible that this is the first post of the Out-take blog? *laughing*

What have you found in your viewfinder, lately?

Cheers,

pete

I take some delight in dreaming up different shapes or sounds of things, art or artifact, that I think  could be brought into the world, based upon that quiet goading from whatever muse is lurking today.  Plenty of others do too,  just look at all the marvelous art, writings,  and handcrafted items on blogs around here! The fact that folks *have* something to put up brings me back, somewhat ashamedly, to the little pokes and prods from the imagination that I allow to just fall away, usually feeling inadequate in skills to the vision, or else too  busy to get beyond putting aside materials for later.

I’ve been more focused on this since the other day, when I read a question on the blog “Over Coffee…” that hit a little close to home. In her blog post, Does our Imagination Inspire Us to Act? Barb Hartsook pondered, “If I don’t act on the imagined, what have I achieved?”

Ulp.  I’d have to say, in my case,  not much more than stored raw materials.

While trying to come up with a post a couple of weeks ago, I had half an ear cocked to an argument on television between financial analysts on what needs to be done to bring the banking system back to health. The phrase that caught my attention was “taking away the toxic assets from Wall Street…”  Our congress sees the toxic assets as impenetrably complex paper instruments of bundled, currently unquantifiable debt. My mind sees a pen-and-ink cartoon of a dour-looking group of investment-bank executives being led, by serious men in guard uniforms, onto waiting buses marked, “Camp Fed”; the  drawing captioned, “taking away Wall Street’s Toxic Assets”.

Aha! Goading from a muse! >Poke, poke<…“Do this, it’ll be fun!” >Prod, prod<…

My response: “That’d be fun; I’d like to see that” mumbled to myself, and on I go with whatever I’d been doing. I told family about the image that’d popped up and they said, “you should do that!”  To which I hemmed and hawed, and said “someone who can draw, now, should do that. Besides, someone might get really offended.”   Yet, I have pens, pencils, brushes, ink, paper and, given two or three days warning, a small desk I could clear, without resorting to explosives, to have a flat surface.  I hope this doesn’t mean I’m just collecting art supplies, but it happens all the time, doesn’t it?

To wit:
• Whistling…>poke< …hm, nice tune…do I go to the piano, work it out and write it down? Not any more.
• Rolling words around in the mouth because you like the feel of them and the rhythm the syllables make…>poke< Hm…a good lyric.  Does it go into a notebook?  That notebook is put away.
• Working on this post brought the design for what I think would make a charming ceramic tea kettle (Thanks Barb!).  Will I try to craft such a thing?

After this whinge about tossing the gifts of imagination to the wind to carry off, I’d like to think so.

How do you overcome your particular inertia?

At least, if I’m already absorbed in creative practice or play, the pokes and whispers of imagination within the task are heeded. Just for ducks, because the end result hss been posted here before,  here’s how looking for a fractal image for a contest went, long ago.
Okay, let’s start with this- -spiral thingy.

Hm. Let’s snazz up the color a bit…looks like structured pizza.

Naw,  that’s really not it. Let’s try red and gold shadings.

>poke Hey! Redraw with the upper right quadrant of the spiral to fill the frame! There’re faces!<

Hm, those look like faces. We’ll just use the frame to alter the width and skew it a bit.

>Poke, poke< It’s a demonic-looking clown, like a monster movie! >prod, poke<

Man, that’s one wei…

>Poke, poke poke…Look at the top, there are ears beside that crown-thing, a snout and a pair of strange curling things<

…rd clown-face. I’ll just record this thing to come back to and make a palette for mousy gray-brown and see what those ears and the snout do.  With any luck, it’ll be animal-like for the contest.

>Woohoo! It’s a bat, change colors and clean up the image to keep the spiral of bats!  Poke, poke<

I’ll be darned, I bet with broadening and  a few alterations to the palette that could be brought out more clearly   And what’s a bat with furled wings doing right side up? I’ll invert it. Of course, this keeps my record of finding weird while others are finding  beauty intact for the contest.

May you have better courage with your inspirations  than I!

Cheers!

pete

Hi, fellow bloggic nomads!
A couple of posts ago, I mentioned the similarities I see in how I approach the workflows of photography and fractal art.  Exploring fractals does have a different challenge for me: I keep finding weird stuff in the fractals.  While other folks are stumbling across structures that they then build into the breath-taking pieces that lead to audible “wow”s, I stumble upon the odd, weird and not-particularly-pretty with some regularity. Maybe  it’s a quantum-level “the observer affects the outcome” thing, but I suppose it could be called “not understanding the math and trying outrageous numbers,” too. *grin*
Or, I could be projecting, finding what is floating around half-submerged in my thoughts.

For example, at one point in the late 80s, we rescued and gave away more than thirty-five rabbits born of two does and a buck rabbit that some one had dumped nearby. We kept and raised 14 that were medically challenged. As a result, I had rabbits in my thoughts for roughly a decade by the time the last one passed away.  A couple years later,  I downloaded Fractint and that’s when odd things started showing up, from the fractals.   [Inserting tongue in cheek and putting on record of the Twilight Zone theme]   I submit here, for your approval,  a few pairs of cross-dimensional similarities.

Hershey, a fourth generation from our original dump-ee’s, sitting on the neighbors’ woodpile.  Next to Hershey is a fractal spiral that, explored with much zooming in, changing parameters and altering how it was colored, gave me a rabbit on a rock ledge to the side of the opening of a rocky warren.

Next:

To reach even further out into the “Pete finds weird fractals” exposition, here we have an ordinary fractal artist, fractaling away at a computer late into the night.  (Okay, there would normally be a room light on, it’s a portrait,  I’m taking license *grin*)    His  fractal counterpart seems to be intently peering at something, as we can see through this fractal keyhole.

I don’t really understand how it happens.  Maybe it’s a fluke of how I built my color palettes.  Where ever I go fractal exploring, the absurd seems to crop up.  Here is another reality/fractality pair:

On the left is an outtake  shot from a small study of eggs made for a class at LVS; a paw-print of eggs, and on the right a pretty fractal perhaps if found by someone else, but a basket of eggs to add to my file of fractal fossils, eggs, paper cut-outs, ring-spouting towers, internal body parts  and critters.  Speaking of critters…

In an earlier post, I related my lifelong interest in bugs, insects and butterflies/moths.  I watch for butterflies, always keeping an eye out for a visit from one of the varieties we had in the yard for years, until the area started being built up.

These swallowtails are in the wet iron-and- lithium-salts-laden sands, near a natural lithium-laced spring, beside the river near my grandparents’ cabin.

On the right is a flight of fractal butterflies…never wavering from their flight formation.

Lastly for this post [fade out Twilight Zone music....fade in Night Gallery music] is a spooky li’l thang, that appeared from neophyte me playing with Atriatix, not really understanding it.   Not something I expected to see, and with a certain level of spookiness to it, but a very interesting image, nonetheless.

On the left here is my only cooperative model for camera classes, in a snazzy tam, posing to demonstrate filling in light on *his* right side with a reflector. To the right in the post is the spookiest fractal I’ve run across in my explorations. It’s an interesting one , the way you can move around the circle to find seven skulls, moving one eye’s orbit at a time.

Well, [fade out Night Gallery music...remove tongue from cheek]  that’s the post.  I had fun looking for pictures to go with the oddities from the math and, if it’s all right with you, I’ll revisit this in the future, when I have more pictures of the real world to go along with more of the weird fractals.

Cheers, take care of each other ‘out there’!

pete

Don’t get me wrong, I’m finding that writing a weblog as a WordPress-hosted column is great; I can afford it for one thing *smile*. I get to do a bit of show-and-tell not otherwise possible, and this is rewarding, until I run into things that fall down, site-style-wise and could be made better by going off the WordPress reservation. My beef today is that when the small version of an image in the main text of my blog is clicked it takes the viewer to a larger version, which is good, displayed left-justified on a blinding white page which ruins the ability to see the image due to its glaring contrast; which is *not* good. Apparently, this is how Things Will Be, unless at some point I can find an affordable host site on which to load the WordPress software and my weblog. I see other folks customizing things with which I’d like to fiddle and it makes me think about how to make a transfer. Happily, a good list to work with is right on the LVS blogging blog in the Hall of Fame Student listings here, at Learn to Do It Right. Planning ahead for a swap makes a bunch of sense to me and this blog entry by Viki Nygaard goes along step by step towards the goal of easing into a new host without dropping off of the blogosphere radar to do so.  Makes me a little impatient to try to spruce up my efforts, at least where I can remember the xhtml and css codings I haven’t used in a hamster’s years; alas, it will have to wait for a $erendipitou$ moment.

I *can,* however, Be Prepared by keeping the rss feed in my Live Bookmarks and learn from all of the posts on Learn to do it Right.  Thanks, Viki!

Cheers!
pete
Hm. This is supposed to be an image presentation blog. Recent events have me looking about for pictures of former furry family members. Here’s Dare, with his own tiny pumpkin, lit within by a military surplus “grain of wheat” lamp, taken under incandescent room light (color balanced a bit in Paint Shop Pro 9+); he was not impressed with the pumpkin smell, lol.

Hi Everyone, in today’s entry, fractal images take the stage. To oversimplify, fractals are the patterns formed by solution sets of certain types of equations. The solution sets have distinct properties, such as self-similarity and infinite detail; no matter how you may magnify or shrink the values you will find stucture that looks similar to every other scale, and there is always more detail to be had.  The equations’ parameters alter as one or more variables are incremented in some fashion as thousands, millions, or greater multiples of solution coordinates are generated.

A coloring variation of a Julia fractal

(Using Fractint)

When I started exploring fractals, making an image was a process where similarities to photography were more obvious. I bought a little program that was advertised in the back of a science magazine. It came on a single floppy disk and used the state of the art EGA monitor we had. The IBM  AT’s massive 2  (two) *grin* megabytes of RAM was plenty of memory. The images that resulted were 16-color banded snapshots.  You’d alter the parameters of an equation,  assign your 16-color palette using a coloring algorithm and save the file. It was a lot of fun, but soon business took precedence, and I had no time to mess with it in any concentrated way. In a couple of years, the AT had died and we had no computer access for a number of years. The next time we did, it was *capable of going online* and I found the Fractint and fractal-art mailing lists. *Big Smile, happy me*.

The freeware granddaddy of fractal generation programs, Fractint was (still is) capable of generating all fractal types, but the most advanced version is still a DOS program. Fractint boosted the color palette to 256 colors, allowing the construction of nice gradients which, in turn, can be designed to mimic lighting, resulting in images with apparent depth and form. The image could be skewed, rotated, zoomed in or out, etc.  This brought the creative process even closer, in my mind, to photography or, even, painting. Even the types of pictures were familiar, with a little help from imagination…

The Portrait:

The Grinch’s Evil Fractal twin. (Using Makin Magic Fractals)

The Flower Shot:

A subdued Christmas flower made, frame and all, in Ultra Fractal.

The Pattern Shot:

Pattern from fractals, note the self-similarity:  the forms are not identical.

(Using Fractint)

The Wildlife Shot:

A spiral of fractal bats; look closely at the ears. (Using Fractint)

The Abstract:

This image was made in Atriatix, and is controlled while the program is generating the image; the image is made up of trajectories.

Lastly for today, the Landscape:

Fractal fog moving onshore *grin*  (Using Dave Makin’s Makin Magic Fractal program)

For several years I worked along trying to develop my own fractal art.  I hope to be getting back to work and catch up a bit after a 5-year interruption in that path. I’ll be trying to learn the new version of Ultrafractal. I had only used my old version for a few images, mostly using a flow-dynamics formula rather than a fractal equation. The program is a sophisticated image manipulation program and some of my favorite fractal artists are bringing out truly painterly pieces-some using more than a hundred layers; some experimenting types have even written their own little ray-tracers to work in it.  I’m a bit worried about getting back on the bronco!

To learn more about fractals from a math perspective and find out the practical side of fractals click on this page by Omegaman_UK.

For a short, interesting overview of the Mandelbrot Set, see this piece, here. Disclaimer: this page is on a commercial software site and my linking to its informational material is not an endorsement of the product, with which I have zero familiarity.
Thanks for comin’ by, have a grand evening!
Cheers,
pete

Hi everyone,  I’ve been driven buggy, by illness, software incompatibilities and balky hardware adventures,  recently. So, I’m posting some bugs!  I finally have a scanner working for tranparencies.  It is not a dedicated film/slide scanner, and requires fairly significant software meddling, so please excuse some differences from “fresh-squeezed” pictures. *smile*

Insects were probably my earliest fascination, beginning before I was in kindergarten; learning about the well-formed conical pits, at the bottom of which the ant lions lay in wait,  or watching the little wrinkly round dirt-and-web door flip up to allow the trapdoor spider to drag its next hapless victim down into its home in the hard dirt.  Butterflies ranging in size  from the tiny blues, with wingspans of less than a half-inch, to the big local swallowtails wobbled from the scrubby desert weeds to the small vegetable garden and the passion flower vine on our back fence. Now, with many of those local creatures endangered or extinct, I sure wish I’d been camera-equipped at age 4!

The first I’d like to share is from a day of “bee practice”, and depicts a honeybee flying in to harvest from a borage flower.  This, like most of the scanned shots, was taken on ISO  64 Kodachrome, using a Nikon FE2 body, a 55 mm micronikkor macro lens and extension tubes or a teleconverter. Lighting was provided by two small Sunpak flashes on a Lepp macrobracket, set up for a 2:1 light ratio to shoot at f11-32, by altering power output settings. Later two more powerful flashes provided TTL flash metering; same set-up, just heavier *grin*.

A shield beetle, rummages for damaging insects in our front garden. The black background is from the drop off of the flashes’ light; no attempt was made to balance the flash with daylight. Sometimes, I prefer the background to drop out like this, sometimes not…it’s one of the ‘whethers’ of photography.

The same with this little ladybird beetle; fill the frame as much as possible and let the flashes enable as much depth of field and stopped motion as possible.  It can make a closeup more dramatic . In this one my left (main light) did not fire, resulting in a stark contrast of light and dark.

The alternative, where only daylight is used for lighting macro, is a dificult dance with your subject and its setting to try to get the parts that count in human perception into your thin depth of field.  This hoverfly is swamped by the framing. until the image is enlarged. This is where I stand with my digital; I have no way to mount a grip with a macrobracket for lighting, yet, and it’s considerably heavier.

Sometimes, experimentally, it can be interesting to go to extremes. Using the set of three extension tubes for the Nikon FE2 body as a base, I added the full extension set from a Celestron C-90 telescope and to the end of that inverted the lens from an army surplus gun-strike camera, the type used to record the use of the aircraft’s weapons. I stuck it on with electrician’s tape. You can see the nice clarity of the lens, the great magnification and get an idea of its depth of field from this picture of a small spider’s leg hairs (nice spider, didn’t run away with all that lens coming at it and the flash going off).  Notice that the depth of field only allows for one upper segment of the three legs of a small spider to focus;  I wish I had a head shot!   I set this lens combination aside; the electricians tape wasn’t holding well. I hope to resurrect it for digital once I find some extension tubes and Canon T-adapter I can buy.

Lastly today, anyone know the genus and species of this critter I took a picture of in Ecuador?  Or even a common name?  The scanner does this slide an injustice; the slide is quite sharp. With something as magnificently camouflaged and as weird (check out the antennae)  as this I made sure I got the whole critter sharp and fit into the frame as large as possible, verticality of porch post be hanged!

What kind of critters do you like to photograph?

Cheers,

pete

]]> http://pingingmyglass.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/driven-bug-gy/feed/ 6 Pete bee2boragec bug1c ladybirdpolc flylunch spiderlegc unkleafhopprac http://pingingmyglass.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/patterns/ http://pingingmyglass.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/patterns/#comments Thu, 05 Feb 2009 02:25:50 +0000 Pete http://pingingmyglass.wordpress.com/?p=328 ]]>

I guess I’m  easily distracted.  Things catch my  eye, whether I’m looking for photographic possibilities in the yard or just walking from the front yard, after filling the feeder with thistle seed,  to the backyard to spread food on the designated areas in the back.  Since we live between the Hayward and Calaveras faults, taking precautionary inventory pictures of the small things that are around the place  also puts me in the position of having my attention caught by some angle or other, some confluence of lines or texture.   The pattern shots here, with one exception, were taken for a part of one of the LVS classes on how to use a digital camera.  It’s a bit more challenging to find shots that will work with the one medium telephoto prime/macro lens I have for the digital body, but it works well for small to macro size patterns and reasonably well for patterns that are tight enough that a small detail shot of the larger pattern will work.

This red popcorn ear from the garden is fully two and  three-quarters inches in length so it fit the parameters well and I just liked the sort of visual counterpoint going on with the darker kernels; your smileage may vary. *smile*.

I think  of pattern shots as extractions from a larger subject and, as mentioned in my post, “A Change in the Whether,” when I do something right, to me pattern shots and abstractions seem to have a sort of rhythm and tempo to them.

These flower pots caught my eye as I walked the area around the house looking for shots for class.  This shot could have benefitted from some of that lovely late afternoon light, but it was not “kicking up” that day. Alas for light.

Pattern shots are a lot of fun to put up, large, as wallpaper on a computer display, if it’s not too hard to read any shortcut icons you may have on the surface.  The pots work okay but the following photograph of a rock from the Stewart Lithia mine in Pala, San Diego is a tad busy. Colloquially called, “graphic granite,”  it has a peculiar growth habit that gives it a pattern all its own, something like  cuneiform, if written by a third-level apprentice  scribe who was  clearly  unable to color within the lines.

The mineral macro shots here were taken with the tripod head removed from the tripod and mounted on the post of a copy stand by means of a Bogen superclamp. Another superclamp holds an extra wide Lepp macrobracket to support two flashes that can be positioned to cover most styles of lighting-very handy to give full form to crystals (or whatever other macro subject is being recorded).  For purposes of passing some light through things from below there’s a plexiglas box in which can be set a flash below the subject, sitting on the copy stand base. This set-up allows things like this macro shot of patterns of magnetite crystals included in the hexagonal growth of this muscovite (mica) “book”.  I may be biased because it’s a mineral, *grin* but I enjoy this monochromatic abstract when the shot rolls around on my screensaver.

A pattern you want to explore and capture can catch you up unexpectedly anytime you are functioning with your photographer’s eyes alert.  This basket handle and weave caught my attention on a shelf above and behind the lighting  stand with a model skull on it that was wearing my coat to be a model in an assigned shot using bounce flash for a class. After seeing it up there I had to bring it down and explore the surface from all around to see what distillation of elements of it’s appearance was drawing my attention.  Once I found that, it was added to the patterns/abstract collection.

I’ve collected patterns from lava flows, machine parts, oil sheens on water,  the rolling swells of a nearly exhausted boat wake, detail extracted from tufa towers, flattened tin cans affixed to the side of a building for protection, geyser muds, cooled cracked obsidian, dried cracked mud…all manner of subjects…I’ve had a ball stumbling across elements of a greater scene that can stand on their own. Take your camera out for a walk, you may too!

Happy Pixel Wrangling!

cheers,

pete