on November 13th, 2008

Very often as I follow the insects and other small creatures in my backyard, I come across a mystery.  These aren’t truly mysteries, as I’m sure someone knows the answer, but in my research I am unable to find an answer as to why things are.
Take for example, this lacewing that I found recently in [...]

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on October 28th, 2008

While shooting some shots this weekend, I found two flies ‘getting to know’ each other.  The following shots tell a little story.  Please note that these images may be inappropriate for some maggots.
If anyone knows the species for these flies, I would appreciate an ID.

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on October 27th, 2008

This weekend one of my friends was nice enough to let me use his 40D to take pictures during several Halloween parties.  Saturday and Sunday mornings, I decided to get a few macro pictures in, as the current estimates say I won’t have the 5D Mark II until the end of the month.

I took [...]

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on October 22nd, 2008

Recently I lent my MP-E 65 macro lens to two colleagues at work.  Both are very good photographers but had never used this lens before.  Interestingly, neither one was able to come up with decent shots from the lens.
Comments that I heard were
“I just don’t have that much patience.”
“I took a number of shots, but [...]

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on October 22nd, 2008

Several weeks ago I found this moth on the side of our shed.

Moths are especially difficult to identify, and I’m not exactly sure that I know what it is.  None of my insect books had it, but that is the case for the majority of moths I come across.
Luckily, I came across this resource on [...]

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on October 15th, 2008

Not too much too say today, so I thought I would post a few creepy crawly shots.  I hope at least one of these grosses you out a bit, because otherwise I’m not doing my job.
I took all of these about two months ago shortly before shooting a house for Nelya.  She didn’t [...]

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OK, I have to admit that this book is not for everyone.  Who should read this book?  Hmmm… Well, if you’re not interested in carpenter ants, you can skip this review.
I happen to find carpenter ants quite interesting and one species of them - Camponotus Modoc, is very common around here.  Therefore, when [...]

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on October 5th, 2008

When I first started taking macro photographs, I thought for sure that all closeup shots of flies were fake.  How could they get the fly to stay still for so long?  After a number of failed experiments, I finally managed to get my first fly shot.  After that, I slowly figured out the hard way [...]

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on October 2nd, 2008

On a recent post I received a question over how the Canon 500D diopter compares with a true macro lens.  When I first bought my camera, I knew I wanted to do macro but I didn’t have the money for a true macro lens.  I wound up purchasing the Sigma 80-400 4.5-5.6 OS lens along [...]

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on October 1st, 2008

A number of people have asked me about the sharpness of the Canon 180L.  In general, I find this to be a very sharp lens but that doesn’t help very much.  Therefore, I decided to try a little test.  Unfortunately, given that I do not have a tremendous amount of time, I was not able [...]

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