House spider cannibalism
These two house spiders (Parasteatoda tepidariorum) either just mated, or were about to, as far as the male, in the lower left was concerned. Unfortunately for him, sexual cannibalism is common in spiders, meaning a female will often eat the male who just fertilized her. Praying mantises are infamous for this, but it’s really the arachnids who make a habit of it. Males of different species have different strategies to avoid this, whether by bringing a large piece of food, waiting until the female has recently molted, or just by being quick and sneaky. Some scorpion males will even sting the female to subdue her until he’s safely away. But other arachnid males will let themselves be captured by the female, or simply don’t have good luck in escaping freely.
Interestingly, these two are pretty close in size. The likelihood of a male being eaten by the female is pretty much proportional to the size difference between the two, since females are usually much larger. So it seems quite possible that this is a species where the male lets the female eat him.
If you look carefully, the male has some webbing wrapped around him, and his legs are curled in the classic spider ‘death pose’; I stuck around for a few minutes and she immediately started biting at a joint in one of the legs, but I had to leave before I could see if she was just subduing him with venom or was actually starting to eat. He’s missing his front left leg, and on a 100% crop a drop of clear liquid is visible in it; I wonder if the digestive enzymes spiders inject into their prey have already taken effect, but I have no idea if it would be visible in a leg wound like that.
Green metallic bee, spiderwort
A green metallic bee (Agapostemon virescens) gathering pollen from a spiderwort. This shot was taken with my new macro flash bracket design.
If you like this, you may also like my other Agapostemon images, like this or this, or my gallery of bees.
Another cheap DIY flash bracket for macro
This is my second macro rig design. It has better balance than the first, though it’s slightly less adjustable — in practice, I found I rarely took advantage of the flexibility of the first one, and the center of gravity was too far forward. Weight and balance is still an issue with this design, but not nearly as much, and the bracket doesn’t begin to droop over time. A lighter flash (i.e., practically anything but the Vivitar 285HV) would address both those problems.
Like the first design, this uses pretty cheap but sturdy parts. Instead of a flat mounting plate mounted to a ballhead under the camera, this one is an angle bracket mounted directly to the camera, with the flash on a ballhead. It’s a lot like the famous butterfly bracket, but the actual metal bracket is pre-built. I got it at the hardware store for about $3. Unfortunately, I don’t see one for that price on Amazon to link to, but I doubt it would be too difficult to find at most hardware stores. It’s basically a straight bar of metal, bent at a right angle in the middle, with holes drilled down the middle for screws. I’ve seen them called angle brackets, mending plates, corner plates, etc. Look for one that’s small and lightweight, with holes that will fit 1/4-20 screws — and you’ll need two of those, obviously not the kind with the sharpened tip.
The angle bracket is screwed on one to the tripod mount under the camera. If you have some thin rubber or plastic, I’d suggest using that as a protective layer so the bottom doesn’t get scratched. I screwed a mini-ballhead to the other end of the bracket, and attached an off-camera cord to the ballhead. Then I just mount the flash on the ballhead, adjust it for the correct angle, and plug the cord into the camera’s hotshoe. That’s it. Total cost of parts, not counting the flash or the camera, is about $30-$40.
Oh, and I’m using a diffuser on the flash, of course. I just taped that together out of cardboard and used a sheet of foam that was used to package some prints I got. I cut a circular shape in the hope that it would improve my specular highlights, but I don’t think the foam diffuses enough. It’s much better than nothing, but there’s not much to say about it.
So overall, it’s a pretty simple system, but I have good control over the flash position for creative adjustments, and the weight and balance aren’t too bad. Keeping things lightweight is critical to reduce camera shake; even a little bit at macro scales will translate into softness or even visible blur in the final image. The flash head is close enough to the subject that I’m getting good exposures at 1/16th power, which is important for a short flash duration — this too reduces softness, because the shorter the flash duration, the less time it has to record any movement of the subject or the camera, and so again reduces softness or blur. Many of the shots I’ve posted lately have been taken with this design, but I like this one in particular.
If you’re building this bracket, find this design useful in your plans, or otherwise appreciate my work on this blog, you can support this site by purchasing some of the basic parts for this design through these links to Amazon.
Zeikos ZE-OCSCC Off Camera Shoe Cord for Canon Flash
Zeikos ZE-OCSCN Off Camera Shoe Cord for Nikon Flash
Professional Ball Head Camera Mount
Common house spider
Finally, a little bit of sun and warmth today. I’m doubly glad of that since this house spider is really the last in my backlog of photos I haven’t posted yet. Spent some time with jumping spiders today, so I’ll hopefully have some neat new shots of those up soon, and more green metallic bees as well — those are a new favorite of mine.
I should have spent more time with the bugs, but I got a new Canon A2 in the mail, and much of my afternoon went to cleaning it and picking up some film. The A2 is one of Canon’s most popular film cameras, and was in production for about a decade — which I believe I’ve read is the longest any of its cameras was on the market. I found one for super cheap on eBay, paying $35 for the body and the VG-10 vertical grip, which is about 20% of what I usually see that combo go for. So far everything seems in working order, but I’m worried that there’s something seriously wrong with it for the price. With any luck, it’s one of those lucky breaks eBay sometimes sends your way, but we’ll see once I get the negatives back.
Water on sumac
It’s been cold and rainy here for the past week. I built a new diffuser yesterday, and hope to get a chance to test it with actual bugs sometime soon — once I do, I’ll post an update on what my current macro rig looks like, since it’s changed a bit since my post describing my DIY flash bracket.
Ad switching
I’ve decided to remove Adsense from the site. It was simply too intrusive, and often completely misunderstood the content of a post. The last straw was the original title of my earlier post of a green metallic bee; they’re also called sweat bees, so the site was plastered with ads for sweat disorder treatments. Not only would I not expect anyone to come to this site for that kind of information, I personally wouldn’t return to a photography site advertising that… I know I could probably take the time to filter out all but photography-related ads, but in the end it wasn’t worth it for me.
My secondary goal of this website is still to offset a portion of my photography costs, so I’ve replaced the old ads with Amazon links. If you purchase something through the links on this site, I’ll earn a small referral fee. On the sidebar is a list of items I personally would use and recommend (and most of them are used to create the content on this site), and there’s a general Amazon search box as well. From time to time I may include a referral link to a piece of gear I review or at least talk about here. I’ll never do this for anything I personally wouldn’t buy or recommend — the purpose of the ads is to support the site, not the other way around.
Carpenter ants at work
I just posted a gallery of black carpenter ants harvesting honeydew from a herd of aphids. A colony will tend a large number of aphids, protecting them from predators and culling the infectious sick, collecting the sugar-rich secretion the aphids produce in return.
Also some cool shots of two ants exchanging their stomach contents in a process called trophallaxis. The whole colony will have similar proportions of food in their stomachs because of this sharing of food. Gross, but very cool.
A mix of neat little things
Whoops! I went a week without posting anything. Work got pretty busy for a few days, and though I’ve been uploading them to my gallery and to Flickr, I haven’t been writing about them.
I’ve added a new gallery for ladybug photos. I’m also including ladybug larvae, which are pretty neat looking. You can distinguish them from caterpillars and worms by their three legs. Around Boston I’ve been seeing a lot of Eastern ladybugs, which have a striking ‘W’ shape on their protonotum (the head-ish region), and even more of their larvae, which have forked spines.
I also built a diffuser out of the packaging that some prints arrived in. It’s improved the highlights on the insects I shoot by quite a bit. I wasn’t happy with the way the bare flash would completely blow out the specular highlights in a bee eye or ant leg, and with the diffuser in place I’m getting back a lot of that lost detail.
The prints that provided material for the diffuser were some test shots I ordered from Bay Photo, the lab that I now have producing my prints. I could not have been happier with the packaging: they were shipped flat, sleeved, and shrink-wrapped around cardboard. Each print is also color-corrected by hand, and printed on high-quality Kodak archival paper.
I specifically wanted to try the Kodak Endura Metallic Paper option through Bay Photo — it’s an amazing, beautiful paper, though there are some images it may not work as well for. I’m still thinking about that. In general, though, I highly recommend using either the metallic or lustre options for any of my prints, which [sales mode=on] you can easily purchase through my gallery — I decided to lower the price on those options to match the less-expensive glossy paper, because a customer who automatically orders the cheapest paper type would be seriously missing out. So, in short, buy my prints and they’ll look good.
Lily Leaf Beetle
This handsome little beasty is a lily leaf beetle, an invasive insect from Europe that has chewed its way through the lilies of Montreal and New England. It’s been called the ‘scourge of Cambridge’. Apparently the University of Rhode Island has been experimenting with parasitoid controls — i.e., another species that, in the beetle’s natural range, uses (and kills) the beetle as part of its life cycle. Ichneumon wasps are a type of parasitoid, though they wouldn’t touch these beetles.
I’m still very happy with the flash bracket I used to take this picture, except for two things: the weight at the front makes it difficult to stabilise, and I haven’t found a good way to diffuse the light yet.
I’m considering picking up a 270EX or 430EX II to replace the Vivitar 285HV I’m using now. Both weight considerably less, and I expect E-TTL II would be helpful for macro work. The 270EX is tiny and cheap, but it’s not terribly advanced. I’m also not sure if I would get the flash duration I want from a weak flash. When you lower the power on a flash, what you’re really doing is lowering the amount of time the flash fires for, and faster flash pulses will freeze motion, like camera shake or wind, better than slow ones. So my thinking is that despite the extra weight of the 430EX II, it’s a more powerful flash, and that might let me use a lower power setting than the 270EX or Vivitar 285HV. But naturally, both flashes cost money, which I don’t have much of.
As for the diffusion problem, I’m still brainstorming. The problem is that I’m getting hot spots that lose all their detail — look at the white glare on the lily leaf beetle’s carapace. I’m also getting it on compound eyes and legs. I’ve got the flash in pretty close and firing it at 1/16th, so it’s about as soft as it’s going to get on its own. We’ll see about this; I don’t have a good idea for it yet.
