In defense of the planet...

Environmental Activism and photography have been bedfellows for a long time. From the photographs of William Henry Jackson, whose photographs in the 1870s later influenced the creation of Yellowstone National Park, through the later work of Elliot Porter, whose work in the Glen Canyon did not save the area from flooding but drew national attention to the environmental conflict, photographers have often fought "the good fight" to preserve the earth we inhabit.
Yes, the Earth has a tremendous capacity for renewal, and there are flowers blooming at Chernobyl. But do you ever wonder just how far we can push before we reach the end of Nature's potential to regenerate? If we lose this game, the stakes are very high.
So the next time some political genius asks, "How's that hopey/changey thing working for ya?", suggest that they ask the residents of the Gulf coast how "Drill, baby, drill" is working for them.

White Balance

Copy and paste the link below or click on the post title "White Balance" to go to a short article about White Balance:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/6455684/White-Balance

Crab Spider on Datura

Two items of interest here. One is the neat way that the spider's arm recapitulates the curve of the datura's petal. This is pure serendipity--you can move some insects around to pose them--the arachnids generally are not amenable to that type of manipulation and will usually head underneath the flower.

The second issue is the white flower. For hairy insects (yes, I know--a spider is not an insect), I like to use fill flash to help the little hairs stand out a bit more. It is very easy to over-expose whites, and I rely heavily on my histogram to prevent this. With whites, the luminance histogram (black and white) is quite adequate. With colors, particularly reds and yellows, the luminance histogram may not tell the entire story, as we will see in the next post.

Spider and Web 2

Spider and Web 1

Spiders and Spider Webs

Spiders and their webs become increasingly interesting subjects as we enter late summer. They are larger than the spiderlings we saw in spring and early summer, and their webs are larger and more intricate. In addition, cooler mornings give us more opportunity for dewy webs.

These two images demonstrate several issues so vital to effective macrophotography: perspective and depth-of-field (d-o-f). Both images were photographed at f5.6, for shallow depth-of-field. If I had not done this, the spider and web would have disappeared into background clutter. The shallow d-o-f isolated the subject nicely. (In this case the subject is both the spider and the web.

After choosing the aperture, I then took the camera OFF the tripod and moved around the subject as best I could (there were pretty dense bushes in front of the spider, so I could not approach from the front) to evaluate the view from different angles. The lateral angle isolates the spider well, but doesn't show much of the web detail. To show more of the web, I had to photography from slightly below the level of the web (with the camera back on the tripod, of course).