On the Road is a weekday feature spotlighting reader photo submissions.
From the exotic to the familiar, whether you’re traveling or in your own backyard, we would love to see the world through your eyes.
No dogs today. A free subscription to the blog for whoever identifies this critter!
How I took it will take a little explaining, so find that below the jump.
Chat about whatever.
Macro photos take more work than the regular kind, and macro pics with flash can be a real pain in the ass. To get it right you need to learn the basics first and then practice, practice, practice. The camera, a Panasonic GH2, matters here because IMO it has one of the best control layouts of any digital camera anywhere. This makes a difference when you need to tinker with a dozen settings at once. The lens is not a macro lens, but rather an old OM 50mm/1.8 on about 40mm of macro extension tubes. The lens is dirt cheap at around $30 on eBay and has fantastic optical quality, although it does not focus very close. A set of hollow tubes, which costs about $10 at Amazon, pushes the lens further away from the sensor without putting any optics in between. This causes the lens to focus much closer than it did before, making a macro lens out of any lens you want. This prevents you from using any electronic features of the lens, which is one more good reason to use an old, cheap lens for this approach. You can buy wired tubes for most systems, but those cost so much that you might as well pay a little more for a real macro lens. Macro tubes throw away a LOT of light, so you need to use them in full sun or else use a strobe to compensate like I did here.
The strobe is another cheapo option, an old Achiever 632 LCD triggered by a cheap radio strobe and held just out of the picture to the left. A clip-on diffuser helped to make the light even and prevent ugly strobe hot-spots. All told everything other than the camera body cost well under two hundred bucks together, so this kind of macro work is hardly out of reach for anyone with an interchangeable lens camera.
To get this shot I set the camera at its max flash sync speed, 1/160 sec, and put its ISO at 320, a level where I could see a bit of ambient light despite heavy input from the flash. Then I set the aperture at f/11, narrow enough to keep most of the bug in focus but not so narrow that diffraction problems take away too much image quality. As a rule try to avoid shooting most lenses either wide open or stopped down all the way. After that I controlled the overall exposure by dialing up or down the power on the flash, which I held in my left hand, and moving it closer or farther away from the subject. The best images happened when I set the flash at absolute minimum power and held it literally just out of the frame. At that distance the little diffuser acted like a really big softbox as far as the subject was concerned and I could light him from as broad an area as possible. Then I found my focus by racking the whole camera back and forth (another problem with macro extension tubes) and I followed the little thing around until it struck an interesting pose. The trick is to take dozens of shots, keep the best ten or twelve and show your favorite one or two of those.
You could argue that using the flash like this created a ‘studio’ look rather than something more naturalistic, but I’m a sucker for the sublime and that’s just how I roll.
Carnacki
A bug! I win. #Winning
scav
bug!
Smaller than a breadbox.
ETA: Damn! Missed it by a hair!
Jay in Oregon
I’m pretty sure that’s a mosquito?
Course, in Alaska, you don’t need macro lenses to see them; I think they’re the unofficial state bird.
Jay C
Mosquito?
ETA: Since I already have a subsciption to Balloon Juice, can I donate mine to a worthy cause if I win?
Ooops! the other “Jay” beat me @ #3….
RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist
Male mosquito on a daisy.
jeffreyw
Nice pic, Tim. No idea what the critter is.
Blue Neponset
George Will?
PeakVT
Fruit fly of some sort.
Frankensteinbeck
@RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist:
Female. Male would have the fluffy antennae to detect pheromones from the female. Looks like a tiger striped mosquito, but mosquito taxonomy is not the easiest thing in the world.
Also, I already tried to post about this and FYWP happened. For all I know I will now post the same thing 50 times.
Tim F.
I thought that mosquitoes ate, you know, people. This guy spent most of his day eating nectar out the little florets.
Comrade Mary
A teeny tiny superhero! It has a mask, is contorted in a pose that has no grounding in biology or physics, and it has no discernible feet.
Very pretty shot, though. I approve!
Frankensteinbeck
@Tim F.:
Most mosquitoes only drink blood to lay eggs. The iron and the very wide range of amino acids is necessary to the process. Nectar feeding is common and the males are entirely nectar feeders.
scav
Ok everyone, let’s get a surge on the goog with everyone looking up “proboscis” with various other terms. Wildly mutant woodpecker that eats pollen is a dead end though.
Violet
Great photo! No idea what it is.
Woodrowfan
it’s one of the moochers that Ayn Rand warned us about!It’s sucking the blood of a job-creator to creator and will soon lay its eggs which will hatch into Acorn-employed welfare queens who will then vote at least 10 times each for Obama because they didn’t need ids to vote!
but that’s just a wild guess…
Jebediah
@Woodrowfan:
Sorry, but you’re wrong. That’s Joe the Fly, who is being smothered, strangled, obliterated and crushed by regulations, high taxes, and other evil soshulistic oppressions.
His speech at the convention is expected to be quite rousing.
NancyDarling
@Jay in Oregon: Funny and true story. There is a town in Alaska named “Chicken”. Its founders were going to name it “Ptarmigan” after the Alaska state bird, but they couldn’t figure out how to spell it so they settled on “Chicken”. At least that is what my brother who lived in Palmer for 10 years told me.
Amir Khalid
Bald eagle.
What do I win?
Frankensteinbeck
Let me add that although I haven’t used my entomology degree in years, the one thing that is absolutely 100% certain is that it’s a mosquito. It is a mosquito. Period. The body shape is distinctive, and the mouthparts are impossible to mistake.
j.e.b.
Paul Ryan. Duh.
RareSanity
Love the increase of photography geek posts!
Keep’em coming…
BGinCHI
That is a picture of the young Paul Ryan, sucking the blood out of the body politic.
BGinCHI
@Tim F.: The females are the bloodsuckers.
Therefore I expect the elephant to be replaced by the mosquito on the GOP web site any minute now.
Amir Khalid
@NancyDarling:
Did none of the founders have a dictionary handy? Or was one of them named Palin?
mainmati
@Tim F.: Only females suck blood not males. Males like them flowers, doncha know.
NancyDarling
@Amir Khalid: Amir, I love that you comment here. It is nice to have the opinions of someone from the other side of the world. Tell me again where you live. Is it Malaysia?
srv
Mursi fires the military heads in Egypt, they roll over. Muslim Brotherhood runs the show now.
The MB and more radical heroes in Syria are getting beat, so now we’re going to go around the UN and establish a private little No Fly Zone, or just give them some SAMs to play with.
Going to be a hell of a Presidential Library from KSA bucks.
RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist
This should be the new mascot of the GOP. The elephant, which never forgets, is obsolete. They need to be represented by an annoying pest and spreader of disease, half of whose members suck blood.
Linda Featheringill
@Tim F.:
Female mosquitoes require a high-protein [blood] snack at some point before they lay their eggs. So any mosquito that bites you is a female. And she doesn’t need blood all the time.
sharl
According to something I heard last night, for most mosquito species,* even females mostly consume nectar until it’s time to produce eggs, at which point they go for the blood. [I don’t know how that breaks out, temporally, in the life cycle of a mosquito, which I seem to recall is very short.]
*It is noted in the audio at the link that the carrier of dengue fever Aedes aegypti is an exception – it likes a regular meal of blood, egg production or not.
ETA, looks like Linda @29 done beat me to it.
Amir Khalid
@NancyDarling:
In Kuala Lumpur, as a matter of fact, with the Petronas Towers dominating the view from my bedroom window.
RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist
I’ve posted this before, but this amazing device described in MAKE Magazine finds the female mosquitos in a room by the sound of their wingbeats, tracks them and shoots them with a laser. It just makes my heart jump for joy to type those words.
And it was developed by hobbyists, not researchers or industry.
Comrade Mary
OMG I have to read that! (And MAKER is porn. Lovely, legal, amazing porn.)
burnspbesq
@srv:
Am I misunderstanding you, or are you actually saying that civilian control of the military is a bad thing?
RossInDetroit, Rational Subjectivist
@Comrade Mary:
If you get the magazine, where the whole long article is, the middle 14 pages or so is an audio amplifier project that I developed.
I love MAKE magazine. It’s like Pl@yb0y for tech nerds.
burnspbesq
I think Alec McGinnis has a pretty good take on why the Warren campaign is in trouble.
http://www.tnr.com/article/magazine/politics/105715/boston-common?page=0,1&utm_source=The%20New%20Republic&utm_campaign=67ecd5baae-TNR_Daily_081312&utm_medium=email
Frankensteinbeck
@burnspbesq:
I think he(she/it?)’s predicting that a Muslim Brotherhood dominated government will inevitably lead to American military response?
burnspbesq
Because its editorial page is a toxic waste dump, it’s easy to forget that the WSJ is capable of commiting random acts of journalism at any time. But they were out front on the story of Adelson’s Macau-related legal problems.
Now the Times is piling on. Popcorn futures are up sharply.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/14/us/politics/sheldon-adelsons-dealings-in-china-are-under-investigation.html?pagewanted=all
srv
@burnspbesq: Not if Sharia equals freedom in your mind.
Better go see the Pyramids while you can, freedom is brewing.
burnspbesq
@Frankensteinbeck:
One more reason to vote for Obama.
We’re hardly in a position to bitch about what is unfolding in Egypt (or in Hungary, fot that matter). The downside of being for democracy is that you have to just grin and bear it when the first free and fair elections in a long time install a government that’s probably going to be pretty bad for the average Egyptian. After all, when Mr. Average Egyptian says “but you elected George W. Bush twice,” we’re a little short on snappy comebacks.
burnspbesq
@srv:
I’m sure you think your comment is crystal clear, but I’m not seeing whatever point it is you’re trying to make. Is there an annotated version for the slow kids?
PeakVT
Are there no entomologists in the house? We need a binomial name, stat.
srv
@burnspbesq: Obummer and the nuevo-neocon Girl Scouts at the State Department are going to create another MB state. They are engineering the replacement of the Allawite regime and will likely trigger a larger civil war. Hundreds of thousands will die.
That’s blood on your Freedom Fries.
Frankensteinbeck
@PeakVT:
There is an entomologist in the house. It looks casually like Aedes albopictus, the Tiger Stripe Mosquito common in the American South. Without being able to closely examine abdominal segments and wing venation and have a taxonomy checklist in front of me, I can’t be sure. There are a LOT of mosquitoes, and the difference between them can involve microscopic details. Mosquitoes were never my specialty anyway, so ‘looks casually like Aedes albopictus’ is the best I can give you.
burnspbesq
@srv:
And the evidence of this is …
srv
@burnspbesq: Y’all don’t seem to be paying attention. Here it is for you in liberal speak:
http://www.democracynow.org/2012/8/13/headlines/clinton_says_syria_no_fly_zone_is_possibility
Tony the Wonderhorse
it’s a brown, hunchback mosquito (from Notre Dame)
scav
@Frankensteinbeck: But, when you said the body type was mosquito, could I describe it as hump-backed & carrot-shaped? Hump optional? Not that I generally stare that hard at them before shooing them off but I might was well be able to guess at if I’m batting at a fly or a skeeter or other random genus-species combo.
PeakVT
@Frankensteinbeck: The legs aren’t stripped, though. But Wikipedia says there are over 3500 species, so I can see how they would be hard to identify.
Frankensteinbeck
@scav:
The hunch, carrot shaped abdomen, long legs and straight wings are all ‘typical’ mosquito traits. There’s some variation. And the proboscis is always visible and can’t be folded up.
SRW1
You didn’t mention how you got the bug to sit still during all the tinkering. That is usually my problem.
scav
@Frankensteinbeck: Huzzah and Thanks! I need to remember to go stare at some very small critters this evening, for it is the season here.
Brachiator
@Frankensteinbeck:
There are all kinds of ways to look at this beyond the possibility of an American military response.
People seem to forget that Egypt gets a fair amount of US military aid (about $1.5 billion) and their government and military has honored peace agreements with Israel.
So far, the US has signalled that aid will continue, but you have to believe that this is being monitored.
And an Egyptian military that is perceived to be unstable or in which competent military commanders are replaced by religious zealots would be worrisome to other countries in the region (and not just to Israel).
@burnspbesq:
There is a continual drumbeat from neo-cons (and from Israeli hardliners) that Middle Eastern authoritarian regimes are to be preferred to anti-Western democracies.
A recent Boston Globe article contained this bit of foreign policy pearl clutching:
The pearl clutchers are obviously in a quandry, fearing both a potential Islamic state and a new authoritarian one. Still, I expect the Republicans to beat the drum about how Obama is either too trusting or in secret agreement with the Muslim Brotherhood.
This is in addition to any debate about nations deal with a potentially hostile, democratically elected government.
AA+ Bonds
Nice photo
That is absolutely gorgeous
Comrade Mary
“They’re nuzzling my flesh with their noses!”
burnspbesq
@srv:
Maybe my thesaurus is broken, but it doesn’t say that “study” and “implement” are synonyms.
And what are you suggesting, anyway? Leave Assad in place? To continue massacring his own people?
ET
Alien life form?
Brachiator
So, let’s see. The Olympics Closing Ceremony was about 3 hours, but NBC managed to chop a hour out of it, mainly so they could fit in a 90 minute piece on the American athletes (from deadspin):
We knew NBC would heavily edit its broadcast of last night’s London Olympics closing ceremony; they cut out a bunch of stuff from the opening ceremony, too, in the name of “tailoring programming to our American audience.” Last night presented an additional scheduling challenge for NBC, as they had to ensure enough time was left for them to premiere a monkey show (an ill-timed promo for which they already had to apologize).
The result? A program that ran in real life for 3:08:10 was shaved down by 51 minutes, 23 seconds by NBC. That’s a lot of excising—27% of the entire performance—and it included some fantastic moments such as a rendition of the Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset” by Ray Davies, a tribute piece sung by Emeli Sandé (whose performance NBC cut out of the opening ceremony, too), and some badass ballet. Here’s everything NBC didn’t show you.
HobbesAI
Hard to tell from just one picture, but it looks, to me, like Ochlerotatus atlanticus.
Zenposeur
I’m not an anatomist, but I’m pretty sure that’s not a mosquito.
I’d call it a bee fly (Bombyliidae, probably from the Phthiriinae subfamily.) Here’s a picture:
http://bugguide.net/node/view/562480
The sure way to call it either a mosquito or not would be to look for the wing scaling. Mosquitoes have scales on their wings and, although the wings aren’t in focus in this picture, you may be able to see them in one of your other pics. Just do a google image search on “mosquito wing” and you’ll get some good examples.