Best of the summer

Bug season is pretty much winding down here in the northeast, and I've been going through my work from the summer, taking stock of what I've gotten. This is the first year I've done this type of photography, and it's gratifying to see the improvement I've made.

I thought I'd post a handful of what I feel is my best work from the season. I've posted a couple of these here before, but these all reflect some aspect of how I've developed as a photographer this year. (This post was written for dgrin.com this morning, but I thought it would be worth posting here as well.)


This is really the first macro shot I was able to accurately previsualize and then produce; it's also my favorite image since going digital. On top of that, this shoot was the first time I learned about metallic bees, which I think are fantastically cool :)



An Asian ladybug on the fence in my front yard; like the green metallic bee, this was among the first images where I was capable of controlling the light in a way that gave me the image I was visualizing. This was taken on a pretty sunny day, not ten feet in front of the white-ish siding of my apartment.



A simple carpenter ant on some kind of flower. (Plant ID is a real weak spot for me -- I'd captioned one photo as an insect on 'some kind of flower', until my girlfriend pointed out that it was, in fact, a common rose.)

I don't think I'd have been able to get a shot with this degree of contrast, with the soft lighting of the buds, and with a hyperactive ant, earlier in the summer, without so much exposure and focus chimping I'd lost the shot. I've gotten good enough at those, particularly at focusing, that I can usually get the shot I want without having to do much of that at all; I find I take two or three shots out of habit, and all of them are technically fine.


I have very few good butterfly images. I definitely need to learn how to approach them, and then get an exposure that's not entirely blown out, since I was mostly seeing these cabbage whites this summer. This one is pretty standard as far as composition goes, but I do like the contrasting shapes of the animal and flower.



This greater angle-winged katydid was just fun to shoot. It was pretty mellow and climbed right onto my hand, so this is from one of the few times I got to shoot a single animal in different compositions over a somewhat extended period of time.



This photo was a real goal of mine all summer. I was on my way home from the park the last week in August when I spotted this tiny orchard spider at the base of a shrub, and I got exactly what I had tried for with any number of less colorful spiders, by laying down behind the web and shooting upwards.

ISO 102400

Canon and Nikon have both released cameras recently that have ridiculous ISO ranges. My 40D can get up to ISO 3200; the just-announced-today 1D Mark IV gets a full five more stops of sensitivity. I haven't seen any samples yet, though Vincent Laforet says the camera can basically see in the dark, and that ISO 6400 is at least as good as what we expect from ISO 1600.

And then think of some of the new image stabilization technology. Canon's new 100mm Macro has a new system that apparently can work well at 1:1 magnification. I don't know how well, but even if it works respectably well, that might give us another two stops.

I think this is going to enable some tremendously interesting things for macro shooters -- it will let us take some of the weight off the camera, which means staying out longer and being able to move the camera easily for better compositions. Imagine a rig designed for daylight shooting, with, instead of a heavy flash and diffuser, a scrim and a reflector on flexible mounts to modify the natural light. Or lightweight flashes with low guide numbers that are working at low/fast power levels. Both of these will still be able to shoot around f/11 or so, without having to pay nearly as much in noise.

Hopefully, this technology will filter down to my personal price range sooner rather than later...

Flash pulse duration

Chuck Westfall's October Tech Tips is out, and he answers a question regarding the flash pulse duration of Canon's speedlites. Canon doesn't publish these numbers so there's quite a bit of speculation, but he points out one thing that I didn't know: at lower power levels, the xenon bulbs used in the flashes are not as efficient as they are at high power. Therefore, a flash firing at 1/16th isn't necessarily firing 16 times faster than it does at full power, since it's putting out less than 1/16th as much light per millisecond.

Without actual numbers or the tools to do some testing, it's impossible to say how much it matters. It's probably still firing faster than it would at 1/4 or 1/8, which is important in flash-based macro because your flash pulse duration is, effectively, your shutter speed.

The bit I find most interesting is where he says "I suspect that if you use a higher power setting on the 430EX to match the output of the 550EX, the flash durations from both Speedlites will end up being very similar if not identical." I've been considering the 430EX II over the 270EX, on the assumption that they'd have similar pulse durations at full power, and therefore the 430EX II would be faster since I'd be using it at lower power levels. It may be that the 270EX at 1/2 or 1/4 power isn't as much of a compromise in speed as I had thought; in terms of price and weight, it's obviously the better choice for macro.

This may seem like nitpicking, but it does have real application for the small animal photography I like to do. On a warm, sunny day, it's simply not possible to get a sharp image of a fast-moving insect without a flash pulse fast enough to freeze its motion. 1/250th of a second is a looong time in that shooting scenario. This photo was taken with the flash pulse at 1/4 power; the bee is quite noticeably blurred, even in the eye and legs, though I don't think it detracts from this particular shot.

Digikam

I'm a long-time user of Linux, and one of the minor annoyances I put up with in photography is the need to use Windows for an efficient workflow with good post-processing control. I've been dual-booting with Ubuntu for about a year now, and had frankly stopped really using it because of a few problems I was never able to resolve. I've always been more of a Gentoo guy, and what with their tenth anniversary this month, I decided to switch back. Except for this past year, I've used it as my primary OS since 2002, so even though it's a lot more DIY, I'm quite comfortable with it.

Anyhow, I've been looking more seriously into Linux RAW processing software. I know there are some really powerful options out there, but I honestly find a lot of that power is more than I need. I've currently got the latest beta of Digikam installed and I think it's about 95% of what I want, but there's still a lot I need to learn about it.

I'll be looking closely at its output later, and hopefully it'll turn out to be a good alternative to Lightroom or even DPP.