CalevPhoto

What are those little millipedes?

I am not a trained entomologist (or even an untrained one) and therefore I often make mistakes when identifying the little creatures that inhabit our world.  This is one of those that I have most often misidentified.

In the past I have misidentified this as a centipede, but it is in fact a millipede.  The easiest way to tell the difference between a millipede and a centipede is a millipede has two legs per body segment while a centipede has one.

Millipedes are generally harmless, though there are several varieties that excrete cyanide as a defensive mechanism.  Still, to my knowledge there aren’t any millipedes out there that can kill out unless you eat one, which I don’t find very tempting.

There particular ones are very common here around Seattle.  I have seen them in a variety of places – from the ponds next to where I work to my backyard.  Recently, I finally took the time to figure out what they are.

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Some days are better than others

As many of you know, every Friday I make an attempt to photograph for an hour by several ponds that are next to the building where I work.  In the past I have gotten some nice shots there, but not every day is the same…

I took this shot with my 180mm macro while I was trying to get close enough to the ducks.  They were very friendly, but I was asking too much to get that close to them.  I’m sure if I was patient and sat there for awhile one of them would have come close, but this is the only shot of the bunch I didn’t delete. Continue Reading…

A so so photograph, but interesting story

As some of you know, each Friday I organize a small photography shoot by three ponds that are next to the building where I work.  Although small, there is a good deal of wildlife here and it is interesting to see how the area changes as the seasons go by.

This isn’t a particularly interesting picture of a millipede.  I have much better millipede shots and it was one of a handful of shots I got that day.  This particular millipede is quite small and I had placed it on some moss nearby for a more interesting shot.

However, the story behind the shot is a bit more interesting.

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Experimenting with insect shots

After reading Myrmecos’s blog on insect photography techniques I decided to try a few of the techniques for myself, particularly photographing on white paper.  So I took a sheet of my kids’ construction paper and brought it outside.  The weather here in the Pacific Northwest still isn’t great – and I managed to find a break in the rain we have been getting recently.  Still, it was cold and windy and several times the wind blew away my paper (once with a poor pill bug still attached).  I tried stabilizing the paper with rocks, but they tended to warp the paper too much.

The experience was more of a learning experience than getting great shots.  The main lesson that I learned was that the flash needs to be compensated for the paper.  As the light meter in the camera strives to expose the image gray, I need to compensate with the flash exposure.  The next time I will try putting it at +1.  Luckily, I take every shot in RAW so I was able to easily adjust the exposure without losing too much of the quality of the shots.  My first attempt was with a millipede that I found.

I would have liked to remove the dirt in the middle of the millipede, but I was worried about hurting it.  While picking the millipede out, I found another little critter that I still need to look up.  Unfortunately none of my shots came out well of it, but this is the best one I could find.  Whatever it was, it was tiny as I needed to take this shot at 5x.

My next victim was a slug.  Here I think for the next time I need to come up with a better background.  Ideally it would be nice to find something that can expose the slime trail. Also, I need to figure out a way to remove the dirt without damaging the slug.

Of course, pill bugs are the easiest to experiment with because they are so plentiful.  I haven’t photographed one in awhile because I have grown rather bored of them, but I decided to get a closeup of this one.

My final experiment of the day was a centipede.  This little bugger was quite tough as they move very quickly and it didn’t like the exposed state of the paper at all.  After convincing it for awhile that it wasn’t about to get off the paper without a few shots it stood still enough for me to get some shots.

Altogether I feel it was a worthwhile experiment.  I will likely try submitting a few of these to the microstock sites- you never know.  The next time though I may try to find some more natural backgrounds like leaves.