Small Stuff

I actually love macro photography. It mostly gets used on flowers. I understand this. Flowers are beautiful. They have great colour. Their shapes are fascinating and a lovely blend of geometry and biology. Somewhere deep in our beings we are either biologically hardwired or spiritually inspired to appreciate them- probably both. I fall victim to the temptation myself sometimes.

There’s way cooler stuff out there to get up close and personal with though. Like creepy insects. My favourite macro lens is actually my Canon EF-S 60mm f/2.8 USM Macro- an absolutely fantastic piece of glassware which unfortunately, due to its EF-S demarcation, only works with the XXXD range of EOS cameras, and not my EOS 5D. As a result, I don’t have an equitable macro lens for my full-frame camera (now my main workhorse), and so these shots are taken with the macro function on the EF 50mm f/1.8- which works well for depth-of-field effect at the open end, but which has a slow, softer focus and not a fraction of the macro-esque magnificence of the aforementioned 60mm. Hence fewer of this sort of image, and the not-s0-macro closeup goodness that the 60mm has offered on other occasions.

For example, these first three photos (respectively: a Praying Mantis with an M&M, a Dead Ant, and the Zip on my Cargo Pants taken in an airport waiting lounge in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, because, why not?) are all taken with the 60mm. They’re golden oldies in my photo collection now, but I’m very fond of them all the same.

The rest, below, were taken more recently. I’d like to point out that the Florida panhandle has some MASSIVE insects, and I missed some great opportunities, for example a psychadelic cricket darn-well near the length of my forearm, and the infamous ‘cow-killer’ ant- actually a very aggressive species of flightless wasp. However, I did love the colour scheme on this spider we found outside the team house- which I’m fairly sure, if the rest of nature is to be trusted, means that it is toxic enough to kill you just by smelling it.

This second spider, on the same property, I’ve included for sheer creep-out value. I didn’t need a macro lens to capture its grotesquery.

On the more attractive end of the spectrum, this butterfly was gracious enough to SITTHEHELLSTILL for just long enough for me to get this grab- and make me crave for a 200mm telephoto lens so that I could catch these beauties and not keep disturbing them.

This is not macro but macaroon- and isn’t remarkably small, either. It is, however, a nice use of depth-of-field and I didn’t have another post to stick it in. I hope it inspires you to new and greater desserts.

Peace out.

Colours of Antigua

In Antigua for several days, I was able to take my camera for a number of walks in the down-time (usually stealing 30 minutes during lunch-breaks to go for a conspicuous wander of the old colonial town’s colour-laden streets).

One such jaunt took me to the markets that sprawl over on the western end of town near the bus depot (subject of a coming post).  There was a local market, full of cheap manufactured goods and produce in a wide array of aromas (but relatively little visual interest).  And there was a tourist market, chocked top to bottom, end to end, with the sort of colourful trinkets and souvenirs that prompt magpie-like travelers to pronounce “Oooh… Shiny!” and immediately open their wallets.

Which I did too.

After all, gifts are fun.

Having made my purchases from one such stall, dripping with tones and textures, I asked the shopkeep if I could take some photos of his wares, and he obliged me without too much prompting, so I spent a few minutes exploring the brightly coloured fabrics with my macro lens, and thoroughly enjoyed the process.

Trialing something new, I’m posting these not as a column of photos, but as a slide-show, which I hope will be a visually appropriate alternative to my normal layout.  Let me know how it goes for you.

If galleries are more your style, then check out some of my Antigua pics over on my Bubblesite page… There are currently 3 for Antigua, with more pics still on the way.

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Oooh… Shiny!

Flowers of Pai

I’m not a great one for flower shots.  It’s not that I don’t like them (within reason) or that there aren’t some really fantastic close-up shots of flowers out there.  It’s just that, well, they tend to be cliched, and often quite uninteresting.

Maybe, much like they have introduced Extreme Ironing, they should introduce Extreme Flower Macros, which would involve taking technically competent close-up photos of flowers in dangerous and exotic locales, like on cliffsides, or in Antarctica.

If they have flowers in Antarctica.

However, every now and again (generally when I am a little bored) I will go for a wander and take some flower shots.  I tend to like flowers when they’re part of a landscape (try here, here, here and here)- they add a flash of colour, contrast and depth.  However occasionally they can look quite nice by themselves.

I went for a number of morning rambles when I was staying in Pai, in Mae Hong Son Province, in north-western Thailand.  I thoroughly enjoyed my time in Pai.  It was peaceful, and there was very little for me to do, save read, write, take photos, and potter around narrow country lanes on my scooter.  I slept well in the cool mountain air in the hut I was staying in, and I would often wake early(-ish).  The days would dawn misty, which would burn off by mid-morning, after which a warm sun would dominate a blue sky until sunset.  Hard to find a more affable climate.

My early morning walks were more limited in subjects, therefore, due to the mist.  It made landscapes hard to capture, and there wasn’t a lot else happening out there.  However the flat, gentle light was perfect for macro photography.  Much like portraits, flowers can be captured in a variety of moods, but the way in which the photographer chooses to do that will be dictated by the light.  Strong overhead light tends to flood colours, and also makes it difficult to avoid the photographer’s shadow becoming part of the frame when trying to take a close-up.  Evening light can be warm and pretty, but often adds an orange cast to petals while trying to capture the richness of the natural colour, and can also be contrasty, destroying fine detail.  By contrast, in a morning mist, light scatters off the very water-droplets in the air, which is why although the total level of light in the mist tends to be lower, the effect on a camera’s exposure meter is not dissimilar to shooting into backlight, resulting in poorly-defined silhouettes, as the light is bouncing off the very air in every direction.

In portraiture and close-up photography, this is kind of like having a zillion tiny little strobes, and can often lend a very pleasing, gentle cast to images that makes them ideal for capturing detail without unnecessary contrast or hue (though beware of using any flash, for the same reason!).  And so I wandered down some of the flower gardens close to where I was staying and investigated the way the dewdrops hung from the petals, and trying to capture the subtleties in the textures and tones of the buds and leaves.

The Canon EF-S 60mm f/2.8 Macro USM that I have for my Canon EOS 400D (seriously, Canon should be sponsoring me) is a joy for this kind of work.  Not only is the 60mm a suitably fast lens at f/2.8 (the 1.6 crop factor makes this a 96mm equivalent on a full-frame 35mm camera), giving fabulous sharp depth-of-field and silky-smooth bokeh (the blurred effect you get in the background of close-up shots of this sort, produced by shooting on a shallow depth of field- that is, wide aperture or low f-stop value), but the macro function is fantastic, and enables incredibly close photography and fabulous details.  Even on a 10 megapixel sensor this allows for some super enlargements, and my biggest regret with this lens (as I’ve lamented elsewhere) is that I can’t stick this lens onto my 5D due to a different mount.  Shame, as I don’t have a macro lens for the full-frame yet, and it’s sorely missed.

Anyhoo, you won’t see many flower-shots in my portfolio, but I did enjoy these ones from Pai.  Hope you do too.

Among Thorns

Colour me unromantic, but I’ve never been one to get into a tizzy for Valentine’s Day, relationship or none. In fact I’m not quite sure where the whole myth popped up from. Doing a bit of research, it seems that nobody really knows much about what a St. Valentine might have done, or might not of done, but it certainly didn’t seem to have too much to do with romancing. There were several martyrs who bore the name, and nobody in the early church seemed to know much about them, including, it seems, the Pope who finally canonized them.  He claimed that while their names were known to man, their deeds would remain known only to God. Opaque, at best.

Valentine’s story was fleshed out more in the 14th Century (trust those renaissance folks to come up with a good yarn), where it turns out he was imprisoned by Emperor Claudius.   Claudius was quite fond of the saint until the preacher tried to convert the good ruler, at which point Claudius ordered Valentine removed from the realm of the living. When pummelings with clubs and stones didn’t seem to do the trick, the shortly-to-be-martyr was dragged out to a city gate and beheaded.  Romantic to the last.

Early sources linking St. Valentine’s Day with lovers is probably more to do with the date than anything about the saint passé. Typically, French courtiers seemed to play a part in the romanticization of the date, with the stakes driven further home by good Bill Shakespeare as the seventeenth century clocked over, during a lament by Hamlet’s hapless love-interest Ophelia. Sources suggest the event has its roots in an ancient pagan tradition held in mid-February dating back to the Romans (who in turn poached it from the Greeks) revolving around sexuality and fertility (those ancients really did like their fertility festivals).  In fact the modern habit of card-giving seems to have really taken off in the mid-eighteen-hundreds when a US cardmaker began mass-producing embossed Valentines cards. So really, it’s the original sales-driven holiday. Score one for consumerism. Again.

(That’d make it Consumerism, 8,716,342: Good Taste and Careful Thought: 4).

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t actually dislike Valentine’s Day. At least, not nearly as much as I dislike Christmas. I’m all up for people celebrating their relationships. And no, this isn’t some bitter single’s rant. In fact, quite the contrary- being single on Valentine’s Day is something of a relief, taking away all that pressure to create, to perform, or simply to spend. I guess I just enjoy bringing in a healthy dose of hard cold reality into all the fuss and frills of our unquestioned modern world as it ploughs over the top of us with all the dignity of a mail-truck full of Hallmark cards.

So for all you lovers out there, happy luvin’, and for all the rest, have a great weekend. I’m going to a chilli fair, a farewell barbecue and a wine festival. What about you?

Photo: A dew-spotted rose unfurling in the early morning mist in northern Thailand.  Selective desaturation in Lightroom used to break out the colour.

Barbs of History

After Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge took control of Cambodia in 1975, a Phnom Penh high school called Tuol Svay Prey was taken and turned into an interrogation, detention and torture centre, among the very cruelest of places the 20th Century- a century of atrocities- saw.  An estimated 17,000 men and women, and several thousand children, passed into the centre and were tortured until they confessed to crimes against the regime- often for many weeks.  Once convicted, they were executed at a killing field outside the city.  Only twelve people who were interred at the prison during its four-year reign of terror are known to have survived.

Tuol Sleng, as the prison came to be known, was liberated by the Vietnamese who marched on Phnom Penh and drove out the Khmer Rouge in January 1979.  They found a dozen or so corpses, still on the beds they had been chained to and executed by their fleeing captors.  Today the place has been preserved as a museum, a place of memorial to those who died, and a place of remembering and learning lest those who come after are ever tempted to repeat such a dark history.

Photo: Barbed wire still strung across a window at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Sweet Lips, Dude

My knowledge of Sweetlips is pretty limited. I first heard of the fish as a species hand-feeding chunks of bread to them from the end of a reefside jetty in Vanuatu about six months ago. Big squat things without fancy colour or graceful shape, they’re still somehow appealing in their brute ugliness, like many fish I paddle across. Apparently they taste great, though I’ve never (to my knowledge) eaten one.

These here are sub-adult Silver Sweetlips- given away by the array of yellow spots over their body. They’re not pretty. They’re not streamlined. As far as I know they’re not possessing of any uncommon intelligence. What makes them special for the photographer, however, is that they’re about as dynamic as cows. They sit there on sandy bottoms- in this case in rock crevices about twenty metres down the reef wall- and hang there an inch off the ground. They don’t really move much, and they don’t appear to be particularly bothered by the presence of divers. If you’re careful, you can get to within a few inches of them, and they might give a lazy flick of the tail and drift just out of reach, but so long as you don’t charge in amongst them, that’s about as much movement as you’re likely to see.

So I had some fun lining up a few shots with them. Here, one Sweetlips shows off the distinctive pattern of yellow spots that sadly fade with time.  You can see the distinctive fat pout that presumable gives the fish its common name.

Firing flash catches some of the silvery hues off the fish’s flank. While I like using natural light where possible to photograph underwater, conditions often make this challenging. If the dive is deep or the sun is behind cloud, not only does this adversely affect shutter-speeds, but you lose the natural colours of the subject, and everything cools down to shades of blue. Firing a flash is like putting a burst of sunshine on a fish, and if you’re subtle about it, you can make it as bright and colourful as it would be at the surface.

Listen to me. I make it sound like I actually know what I’m doing here.

This Sweetlips below clearly had enough of my photographic intrusions and tried to make a run for it. Happily it still moved slowly enough that I could keep it lined up in the frame. Its more colourful piscine cohabitants like the Moorish Idol and the Anemone Clownfish (forthcoming) are rarely so accomodating.

As well as making moves on loitering Sweetlips, we came across a whole bunch of other life down in Sek Passage yesterday. In fact, there were shoals and shoals of the stuff above us near the reef crown.

I only had a split second to fire off a shot at this torpedo-like Barracuda as it streaked past me, so it’s not as sharp as I would have liked. Mind you, his teeth certainly are.

This little fella I have no clue about. All I can say is he was slow enough for me to get a bead on him before he scuttled off. If anyone knows his name, drop me a line. I’m always curious.

My final offering from Sek Passage is somewhat less natural than the rest of my portfolio. This is a diver’s weight, the sort we hang from our belts to help us stay underwater rather than cork to the surface. I spotted it almost directly beneath where we’d anchored the boat at the mouth of the passage. To give you an idea of scale, it’s about three inches long. I don’t know how long it’s been down there, presumably dropped by some slip of wet fingers and lost to the deep. It was about seven metres down. It’s an anthropic intrusion into an otherwise natural environment, but I really like how it’s been colonized by the reef anyway. With luck, in another few years, you won’t even be able to see it at all.

My Amphibious Visitor

For the last two Friday nights this little guy has shown up on my porch.  He gave me quite a fright the other night actually- he takes up a fair bit of room, and makes a heck of a thump when he jumps on the wooden boards.  A sort of a wet splatter bump noise.  He’s generally pretty timid, but as you can see, lets the camera get close if you’re careful.  He’s some species of green tree frog, but I wouldn’t have a clue which kind.  His body’s about the size of my balled fist, but his back legs extend at least 150% of his body length again when he jumps.  A real beauty.

I shot this using the macro function on my little Canon Powershot G9.  As you can see it does a pretty decent job- if you click the pic you’ll see it’s pretty sharp.  It’s night and the light on the deck was poor- in fact you can see the shadow cast on the lower right corner of the frame- that’s the shadow of the camera itself.  I was all of five inches away from his face taking this one.  They say with any decent portrait, the impact from the shot comes from the eyes, and I think this picture is a good case in point.

He may show up uninvited, but in my books he’s welcome any time.