CalevPhoto

A successful day at the ponds

After going almost a month without taking any macro shots, it was time to gather up my MP-E 65 and MT-24EX and see what I could find.  The location was the ponds by my building at work, to which I organize a group of us to meet every week.

It took me awhile to find anything truly interesting.  I dug around in the soil for a bit but gave up on that as I was more in the mood of catching something on a leaf.  While there are quite a few interesting creatures that live in the soil, due to the background it can be difficult to get the artistic edge in shots.

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Insect Wednesday

Last weekend was a productive weekend for me, photography-wise.  I wandered around my yard looking for interesting subjects and found several, without having to look very hard.  This fly was very gracious to let me get several shots off.

I also learned a new trick.  One thing to make sure to not do when photographing flies is to get in their light.  I played around with this one to see how much it does truly matter.  Sure enough, whenever I stood in its light, the fly took off.  Therefore I approached from a direction such that my lens would not cast a shadow on the fly.

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A Curious Case of Midges

Every winter, approximately at this time, I notice that midges start collecting on our shed outside.  My suspicion is that this is for mating, and that there is something about the shed that the midges like.  Last weekend I decided to see what I could find outside and to no great surprise I found a few midges on our barn.

I didn’t bother photographing them for very long because there weren’t that many of them, I already have a number of photographs of midges, and there weren’t any midges in really great photographic position.

Nevertheless, that didn’t prevent several mysteries from cropping up.

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A few shots for the weekend

Not much to say today, but I thought I would discuss some more photos I took by my building at work.

I found this small centipede in some leaf litter I was going through and decided that was not the most photogenic place for it.  Therefore I found this flower nearby and placed it on top.  The centipede seemed rather confused and wandered around the flower for a bit, before I placed it back in the leaf litter.  It’s probably the equivalent of someone putting us an Mars - we would likely wonder - “where the heck are we?” (note: I am assuming whoever did it was kind enough to give us a space suit or else we wouldn’t have much time to think).

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You cannot escape insects

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I decided over the weekend to go and take some dew drop photographs.  This provided a nice relief from hunting bugs - though I do rather wish now I had spent some time hunting them as we had excellent weather unlike some of our friends back east.  Anyway, I settled onto the wet ground and began to take some dew drop shots with a primrose reflected in a dew drop.

However, a certain little insect decided that it wanted its photo taken and settled down right next to my shoot.  Perhaps it had heard that I was photographing insects in the area and wanted a portrait.  Who knows, but I was unable to resist the temptation to photograph it.

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An invasion of midges

As many of you who watch the news know, things have been a bit cold here recently. This has resulted in it being difficult to find interesting bugs to photograph. During the spring and summer, it sometimes seems like I am limited only by time and flash card memory. During this time of year, I am lucky to get a few half decent shots.

However, there are insects to be found at this time of year. Woodlice are as common as ever and centipedes and spiders are also not difficult to find. Recently I have also noticed an increase in springtails that will be the subject of a blog in the near future. So far there are no ants or much in winged insects but I suspect that will change towards the end of February. However, I have seen a marked increase in the number of midges.

One of the nice things about macro photography is, until recently, I had no true idea what a midge is. From the Wikipedia article the term “midge” is a rather generic term that refers to a number of relatively unrelated families of insects. According to Insects Their Natural History and Diversity, midge “is a kind of handy term to refer to the little flies that a happy motorcyclist gets to scrape off his teeth after a summer night’s ride”. While a number of them look like mosquitoes, they lack the long needle that mosquitoes use to puncture the flesh to draw blood. Here in the Pacific Northwest, the midges I have come across are a non-biting variety and are quite harmless. In other parts of the world the midges do bite and there are even theories that parts of Scotland are not strongly populated due to the presence of the midge.

It seems that the local midges here love the barn in my backyard because whenever I look I can find a number of them resting on the outside of it, and even more caught in the spider webs hanging from the roof. The majority of the midges hanging on the barn are very easy to photograph. They don’t mind the lens getting so close and I even lightly poked one to make sure it wasn’t dead. Perhaps they are in a breeding mode or resting during the day – I’m not quite sure why they hang on the side of the barn for hours on end.

For those of you wondering what a midge (at least here) looks like, the following is a shot.

In particular I get a kick out of the “hairdo” on top of their heads. The following is a closer shot of “the do”.

According to one of my insect books, this signifies that the midge is a male. If this is true, then the logical consequence is this image is a female

Some midges are considered to be garden pests. Perhaps these ones are as well. I have noticed a number of pieces of leaves missing on some of my plants, but so far it has been difficult to determine what has been eating them. Besides, due to my photography habits I do not allow anyone to spray pesticides in the yard. Sometimes my wife gets a bit upset about this. I offered to purchase a bunch of praying mantids to help keep the insects down but she knows my true aspirations are to get some good mantid shots. J

Whatever they are doing, they are so impartial to their surroundings that they let me get close enough to them to get shots like this.

After some research, I found that this midge, as with many others, belongs to the family Chironomidae. This is a huge family with 2,000 members just in North America and are very common during the winter. So, the next time I hear the word “midge” I will be able to put a picture to the word!