Busy, busy!

More test shots; back to the aquarium and live critters again.

This first photo is as taken; despeckled, resized, and sharpened only. I left the "dust" in place; it's part of the action.

In the upper levels of the tank, like it would be on the intertidal flats, everything is in constant motion. Here, the red algae sways in the water, and a small family of blue anemones glued to a fragile blade waves its tentacles, hoping to catch some of the swimmers that muddy up the current. Behind, bubbles dance; large ones going down, from the pump; small ones heading back up to the surface, carrying goodies collected en route. Released at the top, the goodies float back down; more specks in the water.

This red algae gathers "dust". I pour clean water over it, or take it out and swish it around in fresh water, and it looks beautifully clean. A few minutes back in the tank, and it's covered in these little specks. Some may be sand, some is detritus, leftovers from critter meals or floating fragments of rotting eelgrass, and the rest is made up of small animals, copepods and amphipods eating detritus, and tiny worms eating copepods and amphipods.

And I hadn't even noticed the hermit until I looked at the photo. There's usually one or two hidden somewhere in this mess.

Everything going at once

On the other end of the tank, and up close to the wall, things are more peaceful.

Leafy hornmouth snail, Ceratostoma foliatum, sleeping.

The water is clearer away from the current; I removed only a handful of swimmers and a scratch on the glass. This snail eats barnacles; in between times, he wanders around the walls, then goes to sleep for a day or so.

His shell started out white and pink, but as he grows it gets craggier and darker. He's beginning to show the "leaves" that give him his name; for now, they're just sharp lengthwise ridges.

Setup for these photos: black poster board behind tank, white reflector above and on both sides, spotlight aimed at top reflector, flash ditto. This seems to work on the upper levels, but not down on the sand. More experimentation needed.

More practice shots: white on white

I'm still learning how to use the new gear, working with different settings and configurations of camera, lens, and reflectors. I decided it would be simpler to practice on something that was not constantly getting in fights, or wandering off for a bite to eat, or just turning his back on me. Not a hermit nor a shrimp, in other words.

I chose, instead, an old sea urchin test, without its spines, and a sprig of dried everlasting flowers.

This first photo is as it came out of the camera; no processing at all, other than resizing for the blog.

Almost lace. And there are a few remnants of spines, after all.

For this next one, I changed the aperture and moved in closer. That produced some noise, which I partly removed in processing. Still, there was minimal work to be done; despeckling, cropping, resizing.

Close-up of urchin buttons and holes. I think they're where the spines were inserted.

And the everlasting; again, with minimal processing; removing a dust speck, resizing, sharpening.

White on white, with hints of pink.

I'm pleased. Depth of field is still something to work with; for example, on the urchin, every part that curves away from the camera is out of focus. And the lens definitely loves light. For these, I had the flash, a spotlight, general room lighting, a white sheet, whiter paper, and two big white reflectors (one is the lid of a big plastic bowl; what works, works.)

More practice shots tomorrow; something alive, again.

Testing, testing

Seeing what my new reflector and light blockers will do. A few shots with the old lens, no flash.

Plumose anemone in full feeding mode

Browns and greens

"Missed my exit again!"

Flash used here, with white reflector and black backdrop. One of the small anemones.

I've been working with the new lens. It's more demanding, has a very shallow depth of field, and stringent light requirements, but it brings out details that I'd never seen before. I'll have more test shots tomorrow.

Test shot: cloudy night, with moon

As I was coming home tonight, the moon was playing peek-a-boo behind dark clouds. I stopped in a handy parking lot to get a photo before they swallowed it altogether.

No man in this moon.

The little pocket Sony was fast enough to deal with camera shake without a tripod in the dark. (The curvy car door doesn't make a good substitute.) The background was noisy, though; I don't know if all the colours were from the Home Depot lights behind me, or from the moon's halo in the clouds.

A couple of water bugs

In the vacant lot across the street, the ground is hard-pan clay mixed with old construction debris. It is marked on old maps as the headwater of Cougar Creek, but the creek has long since disappeared; all that's left is a shallow pond that dries up by summer, leaving cracked, hardened mud. After the spring rains, though, much of the lot is under an inch or two of water, and for a couple of months it teems with swimming and diving life.

It's early days, still, but the temperature is rising, and a few ambitious bugs are patrolling the newly-drowned roots and debris.

Still testing the new lens, I examined the water, where I could reach it without sinking in the mud. I saw a few water tigers, the larvae of predaceous diving beetles, about 1/2 an inch long, the same colour as the mud and only visible when they moved. The camera couldn't find them; it's not programmed to notice biological movement, as our eyes are.

I was surprised to see a water strider; it's really early for these, but this was a very small strider, a youngster.

This, the camera could see even when I couldn't.

The surface of the water in some areas was covered with tiny, sparkly dots that I only saw when I downloaded the photos. I'm thinking they're probably more ostracods, like I found there a couple of years ago, in June. If there's another dry day soon, I'll go over with a magnifying glass to check them out.

And there were a couple of the small diving beetles, Acilius semisculatus. These swim smoothly and quite fast near the bottom (although in 2 inches of water, the bottom is near the top). Usually, I see them but don't get a photo; they're mostly gone by the time the camera focuses, so I was pleased that this new lens is so fast, even when I'm shooting from several feet away, through muddy water.

Quick shot before he disappeared under the roots.

Test shot. Nothing there, I think; nothing but gravel and old plants under two inches of water.

Miss B and the new lens

Tonight, Laurie spied a spider creeping out from under a bookcase to grab a tiny fly. One of Brownie's relatives; it's been a while since I saw one. We've had a long, almost critterless winter around here.

Time to test out the new macro lens. I took a dozen shots, then she objected to the flash and went to hide under the books again.

Photo #3, unedited except for lighting, and cropped to about 1/4 the original. (Click to see full size.)

The lens has its quirks. I'll have to do quite a bit of work to learn to use its good points and compensate for the problems.

I can't crawl in too close. That's good, and not so good. I'd never have gotten an inch from Miss B, here, as I would have had to do with the old cameras. But I'm also getting a lot of background, wasted pixels.

The closest I can manage to focus is at 6 inches. And there, the depth of field is next to nil. In the photo above, the tips of her legs and the back half of her abdomen are out of focus.

Miss B's fly, very small. Only a narrow strip of carpet is in focus; a quarter inch at the most.

The camera is quick, and has VR (vibration reduction) enabled. This really helps with camera shake, a big help when I'm on belly and elbows on the floor, hand-holding the camera, stalking a critter that moves about. Only three photos out of the dozen were badly blurred, a record for me.

And the flash works consistently, without a long wait to recharge.

Focussing, even in the semi-dark, is quick and accurate. When the spider wandered off, the focus followed her.

But. I'll have to work up to manual focus, to be able to aim at the part of the spider I'm interested in. Eyes and fangs, for example. The Auto focus just says, "Small object!" and aims for the center, ending up with a knee in focus and the eyes a blur.

Note: Steatoda bipunctata (Miss B and all her kin) make very messy webs. Even to their bug tie-downs. No neat butcher's packages for them.

Also: S. bipunctata's favourite food is sowbugs. With my nose on the carpet, I could see under the bookshelf. Miss B's stash of leftover dinners is a couple or three dried sowbugs.