Cellar spiders
I mentioned yesterday that harvestmen are one of a few unrelated animals to be known as ‘daddy long legs’. Another is the cellar spider, Pholcus phalangioides. These are true spiders, unlike the harvestmen, and though they are very mildly venomous, it’s unlikely to come across one with both the inclination and the ability to bite through human skin. This is another one of those species that people think, mistakenly, would be lethal if they had longer fangs.
These spiders spend most of their time hanging upside down in their webs, catching and eating smaller invertebrates. They’re generally beneficial, since they eat pest species like mosquitos — in fact they’re useful for keeping down populations of certain dangerous spider species in Australia.
To photograph these spiders, I mostly used the DIY flash bracket I made. About halfway through I tried attaching a bounce card to the flash but found it kept hitting the webs and disturbing the animals. Eventually I realized that, as long as I was just in my basement photographing spiders sitting in webs, a tripod might be the better option. I do need to figure out some way to diffuse the flash a little better, especially for small reflective or translucent animals like these.
Another thing I realised in a discussion with another photographer on Flickr is that I keep all my photos in the same aspect ratio. The square crop you see above is a conscious effort to get out of that mental mold.
Harvestman
This morning was pretty chilly and not much was out in the way of tiny invertebrates. I was trying to get a better angle on a small spider who was hiding in a curled leaf, and as I stood up to move to the other side, I saw an absolutely gigantic opilionid, a harvestman, sunning itself on the leafy bush next to me. A much better opportunity. I ended up finding about a half dozen harvestmen in and around the bush, and a few one the surrounding trees as well.
They look like spiders — they are fellow arachnids — but there are a few important differences. For one, they don’t spin webs (they lack the organs to) and have no venom at all. They mostly prey on soft-bodied animals like aphids, and actually have some value in agriculture as a species that contributes to keeping down pest levels. They’ll also scavenge and cannibalize.
You can tell a opilionid from a spider quickly by two obvious clues. First, opilionids have two eyes mounted on a tubercule along the midline of the body, instead of the eight eyes spread along the front of a spider’s body. Spiders and harvestmen both have a body composed of two main segments, a cephalothorax (the front head-torso region) and an abdomen, but while spiders have a narrow pinching waist that clearly marks where one ends and one begins. The two sections are much harder to determine in opilionids.
I’m pretty certain that the species I photographed is Phalangium opilio, and the bolder markings along the abdomen seem to imply that I found females. I am open to correction on both of these points.
Daring jumping spider
A daring jumping spider (Phidippus audax), in my bathroom. I saw it while getting ready for work, and ran to grab the camera — didn’t have time for a great shot of those green chelicerae but I was happy with this one.
Although they’re large (this one was about a half-inch long I think), jumping spiders are harmless. Nothing to be afraid of from this animal. They’re called ‘daring’ jumping spiders because they’re quite aware of you when you’re watching them, and they’ll watch right back. Most spiders either have poor vision and won’t see you, or have good vision and will run and hide. They’re popular with arachnophiles because of this, and because of the metallic green chelicerae (think fangs) you can see in this image. They don’t spin webs: you’ll see them with silk tethers, but they only use them as safety lines while hunting or traveling.
Speaking of the macro bracket, I’ll be posting an update on how it works with an off-camera flash cord later this week. My first impression is that the balance and weight are much better, and the flash is much more securely placed than it was with the Cactus V2s receiver. I do need to find some way of diffusing the light, though.
A simple DIY macro flash bracket, pt. 2
I took the macro flash bracket I built out for a spin today and got some great results. The first thing I did was to move the flash from the left to the right side so it doesn’t interfere with my left hand adjusting the focus ring on the lens. I think, in the future at some point, I might pick up a tripod collar mount and attach the bracket to that instead — that way I can have even more control over the flash location.
I decided to go check out a small local green space — my neighborhood has a shortage of them, unfortunately — and found a great carpenter bee about halfway there, gathering pollen from a flowering bush. I slightly missed the focus, but not so badly to lose the photo.
The area I went to is open to the public, but I don’t think it’s an actual park. There’s one rotting tree in particular that always has interesting things living in it, so I went straight there. Immediately, I saw a long insect, vaguely dragonfly-like in form, flying next to it and got in close to take a photo. Two things immediately caught my eye: first, the black and yellow ‘warning’ coloration of a wasp, and second, the other five or six I was immediately next to.
I didn’t remember exactly what they were until I got home: giant ichneumon wasps. This species is remarkable for its parasitoid lifestyle. The female lays her eggs in the wood-dwelling larvae of another wasp species by drilling through the tree and into the larval wasp with a long, sharp ovipositor. The larval ichneumons grow inside the other wasp until pupating — this is invariably fatal to the other wasp — and what I came across today was a crowd of males racing to fertilize one or more females still inside the tree.
I got a number of good images of these wasps, enough to post in their own gallery here. (The other photos I took today are in this gallery.)
After moving on, I found another bee on a tree root. It either couldn’t fly or didn’t want to, though eventually climbed very quickly up the tree. I’m not sure if it was a dark breed of honey bee, or one that had lost most of its hairs, but its abdomen was entirely bald and black.
Leaving the grounds, I decided to take a quick shot of a few small leaves. I almost didn’t because it’s the kind of shot I’ve taken many times, but I felt like I should see how well the bracket worked for more still-life types of macro images. Looking at the image on the viewfinder, I was surprised to see a little bug of some kind in perfect focus. I have no idea what it is exactly; maybe an aphid or something.
Coming home, I had a really high percentage of keepers today. A lot of what I tossed were intentional losses — even at f/14, macro DOF is thin enough that handholding the camera will inevitably mean camera shake moves the focus point off your subject, so I’ll often take a couple to improve the odds, and toss all but the best one. Even the second-best shots are generally sharp, in focus, and well defined, and I attribute this to the convenience of having the flash on a macro bracket. Without it, I’d have been shooting in Tv at a high shutter speed, sacrificing ISO and small apertures, and while you can definitely get good shots doing that, my yield was much better today.
A simple DIY macro flash bracket
Update: I like this bracket design better.
Off-camera flash is incredibly useful with macro photography, since at high magnifications you don’t have a lot of light coming into the camera, and the high speed of the flash helps to eliminate camera shake. There are a number of products that will enable this — flash brackets, wireless remotes, etc. — but the dirty secret of photography is that things like this cost money. Sometimes, serious money. So I made a flash bracket that puts the flash about 8″ from the camera, and can provide some adjustment of height as well. This doesn’t sound like a lot, especially when thinking in strobist terms, but this is specifically for macro work, and 8″ in macro is quite enough.
First, what I had been using was a Cactus V2s wireless radio trigger handheld, mounted on a mini-tripod, or just placed on the ground someplace nearby. The problem with all these is that if I want the flash to get close, I usually have to go handheld, and that sacrifices stability and balance of the camera. The angular size of a light source determines how soft or hard it appears on the subject, so when you’re shooting a small insect, an unmodified strobe can work well at low power and a few inches away. Off-strobe modifiers, like diffusers and reflectors that help control the light, are simply not practical most of the time, especially when shooting skittish insects.
A macro flash bracket is different that a typical flash bracket used by, say, a wedding photographer. Those raise the flash height just enough to avoid red-eye. It’s still basically on the lens-subject axis, just a few degrees off. A macro flash bracket like this is going to be considerably further off-axis when you consider that the subject is about a foot from the camera.
I used the following parts:
* A mini-ballhead from a tripod I already had. These would run like $12 new.
* A flash shoe mount with a 1/4-20 thread on the bottom. At first I used the Cactus V2s receiver, and later switched over to an off-camera cord. A generic cold shoe is like $6 on eBay; anything would work here.
* A trigger of some kind. If you use the off-camera cord, that’ll do it and allow TTL; otherwise you’ll probably need to use a PC cord terminal and manual mode on the flash. If you don’t already have all the right cords and whatnot, just go with a third-party or used off-camera cord for simplicity.
* An 8″ mending plate with counter-sunk holes. $2.99 from my local hardware store.
* Two 1/2″ screws, 1/4-20. $0.67 each. I got the kind with the beveled head, since the holes in the mounting plate were countersunk. Thumb screws would be spendier but smarter, since you wouldn’t have to carry a screwdriver to adjust anything. Whatever you use, make sure it’s not the pointy kind :)
Giottos Mini Ballhead
Zeikos Off Camera Shoe Cord for Canon
Stanley Hardware 8″ Mending Plate
Electro Hardware 1/4-20×1/2 Thumb Screw
Purchasing any needed parts through the links will support this site. Disclaimer: I haven’t directly used any of them. I use a larger Giottos ballhead and wouldn’t hesitate to use one of their mini ballheads here; the off-camera cords are sold through Amazon, who has a good return and exchange policy if they flake out; and the hardware is pretty generic; as long as your screw or bolt has a wide enough head to cover the mending plate holes, or if you use a washer, it’s hard to go wrong with any of it. Of course, if you try any of these products based on my suggestion and they fail spectacularly, please let me know.
I mounted the ballhead to one side of the plate, and the receiver to the other. Then it’s just a question of attaching the flash to the receiver and the camera to the ballhead. Even if you have none of the parts, you can put this together for about $20 new.
By using the ballhead, I get some control over the position of the flash. I can raise it or lower it a few inches, and of course bring it forward or backwards. The pics only show it side-by-side with the camera, but with a ballhead its position is only limited by the length of the plate and the camera itself. It also keeps the mending plate away from the camera — the edges aren’t terribly sharp, but they could superficially scratch the camera. I stuck some rubber tape over the flash end, even though I doubt I’d hurt myself on it. Also, make sure to line up the ballhead so that its side notches are parallel with the plate — this will let it travel up and down.
Right now I’m triggering it with a PC sync cord. Even though I’m using the wireless receiver, its battery is starting to go and I’m getting banding at 1/250 shutter speed. I just ordered a used off-camera flash cord for $20 to swap with the receiver — it’ll get me a bottom-threaded shoe mount with better balance, and it should keep TTL functions if I ever decide to get a flash with TTL. Plus, I don’t see the point of using wireless triggers this close to the camera.
I’ll be really testing this out tomorrow, but I’ve taken one or two test shots already and it seems to work quite well.
Update: See my notes from my first outing with this bracket here. I’ve since replaced the Cactus receiver and PC cord with a 2′ off-camera TTL cable and it’s better in every way
– the balance is better, it’s more securely mounted, it doesn’t randomly disconnect, it’s easier to position on either side, and when/if I can upgrade to a TTL flash, it’ll come in even handier.
Garden snail, leaf
A garden snail. There were quite a few out this morning. Edit: fixed the image.
Helios-44-2
I picked up a Helios-44-2 58mm f/2 lens a week or two ago. It’s a lens with an interesting history: when the USSR got their half of Berlin after the end of World War II, they discovered that they were suddenly in possession of a factory that produced Zeiss lenses, one of the masters of the field. [edit: removed some mis-history]
The Helios-44 line is a clone of the Zeiss Biotar lens, and while it’s probably not optically identical, it has the advantage of being one of the most mass-produced of any lens throughout history, which means it’s cheap and plentiful. I got mine for $12 plus shipping, and it came with a (non-functional) Zenit-E camera to boot. Most of the Helios-44 lenses have the common M42 screw-mount, and adapters that allow you to mount these lenses on Canon EOS cameras are pretty cheap.
So I stuck it on my 40D.
It’s a manual lens. This means that you have to set the camera to aperture priority or to full manual mode, and then set the aperture ring on the front of the lens. It’s also a preset lens, which means there’s a second aperture ring that slides the aperture from wide-open to whatever the aperture is set to — this is because the viewfinder darkens as you stop down, so it’s handy to focus wide open, then quickly slide the aperture down before you take the photo. Modern cameras do this for you, but the Helios is not so modern.
I do find that my 40D’s metering is a bit off through this lens. Setting the exposure compensation to +1 helps, and I might try another stop or two higher just to push the histogram further. Focusing is a little tricky and I haven’t mastered it yet. I might pick up the manual focusing viewfinder screen for the 40D, since I do a lot of that anyway, especially with ring USM lenses.
I’ve read that this lens is supposed to be pretty sharp after f/5.8 or so. I’m not really finding that. It could be that my copy is off a bit (quality control on the Soviet lenses was not that consistent), or it could be that people mean it’s relatively sharp compared to other lenses of its era, but I find there’s a subtle softness to it. This doesn’t bother me. I do a lot of plant photography, and for this, it gives some very interesting results.
The color rendition (especially green) is fantastic. Subdued, but saturated. The bokeh, too, is amazing. It’s very smooth and fluid, and the transition from focus to bokeh looks great. It’s certainly different than my Canon lenses, and I quite like it. The lens is infamous for a strange distortion that appears when stopped down a bit: distant bokeh becomes distorted in a swirly, almost fisheye fashion. It’s not displeasing, though it can be surprising or distracting if the photographer doesn’t take it into account while making the image. It’s definitely interesting — a good example is the photo of Japanese maple.
I like this lens a lot. For the money, it’s a lot of fun, and it’s providing some really great images.
Norway maple
Norway maple
Originally uploaded by mehampson
Another Helios-44-2 photo. Note the smooth, swirly bokeh and great color.
Japanese maple
Japanese maple
Originally uploaded by mehampson
Shot with an old Soviet Helios-44-2, a clone of the Zeiss Biotar 58mm f/2 lens. I’ll write more about this interesting little lens this week.
Some backbone
Some backbone
Originally uploaded by mehampson
One small problem I have with studio macros like this is the lack of a good background. My blue-grey wall provides pretty boring bokeh… So while taking some shots of this capelin spine, I came across a new technique that shows great promise for providing interesting, well-blurred backgrounds: I took a large book with a good cover illustration, placed it behind the subject, and, magically, interesting bokeh.
Cheating perhaps. But much better than the wall.
