I followed a honey bee around with my macro lens as it made its way through the peach blossoms.
Category: Macro Photography
Lithobius forficatus
It’s the time of year the sugar ants start prowling the kitchen for anything we have left unsealed. With the reemergence of sugar ants comes a lot of other insects, arthropods, myriapods and arachnids — what most people refer to as creepy crawlers — and with this reawakening of the “creepy crawlers” out comes my macro lens.
Today’s photo is of a Lithobius forficatus, commonly known as the stone centipede. We have lots of these 30 legged centipedes in the garden where they stir around in the soil mostly under rocks and wood eating lots of pests. One pest that centipedes eat are roly-polys or pill bugs, which are actually crustaceans. I don’t know of other predators in the garden that eat roly-polys. For those of you who are herpetophobic or ophidiophobic, larger centipedes will kill and eat small snakes and lizards. Centipedes also eat spiders and insects.
The Black Widow
“And here, my prize, the Black Widow. Isn’t she lovely?…And so deadly. Her kiss is fifteen times as poisonous as that of the rattlesnake. You see her venom is highly neurotoxic, which is to say that it attacks the central nervous system causing intense pain, profuse sweating, difficulty in breathing, loss of consciousness, violent convulsions and, finally…Death. You know what I think I love the most about her is her inborn need to dominate, possess. In fact, immediately after the consummation of her marriage to the smaller and weaker male of the species she kills and eats him…(laugh) oh, she is delicious…And I hope he was!”
Those words are part of Vincent Price’s introduction to “The Black Widow” on Alice Cooper’s 1975 album “Welcome to My Nightmare”.
While I was working on the gray water system this afternoon, I found a black widow where they like to be — in wet, humid areas — like the underside of the cover for the distribution hub for the gray water system. She seemed a little stunned by her sudden exposure to the sunlight, and allowed me to do several photos of her underside from different angles; but then I got too close and she scampered under some of the mulch. While I was cleaning out the pipes, she ran out on the cover to dry herself after I apparently got her wet. She allowed me to do several macro shots from a top view while she was drying out; therefore, the series gives you a detailed look at Vincent’s prize “The Black Widow”.
Fiddling with Film
I got a 4X5 view camera and lens on ebay, and I had ordered an adapter that was supposed to allow me to use my Canon bodies on the 4X5, moving the adapter around to six different positions to cover most of the view area on the 4X5. Then I would have stitched the six images together to make the final photo. The adapter didn’t fit right so it couldn’t move through any of the positions, which was useless, so I returned the adapter. I was going to return the 4X5, but then I thought, “what the heck” and decided to keep it and do some film again (I used a 4X5 view camera exclusively when I was a photo student in the early 1980’s).
I mixed up chemicals this morning, and using a daylight changing bag, I loaded negatives I had taken a couple of weeks ago into a daylight processing tank. I processed my first test negatives in the kitchen sink this afternoon, and hung them over the sink to dry. It was fun and nostalgic being a photo-chemist again — measuring and mixing the developer, fixer and hypo-clearing agent, getting the developer to the right temperature, agitating the tank at minute intervals while the developer did its magic, followed by the stop bath, fixer, hypo-clearing agent and final rinse. All the time there was much anticipation with some anxiety about the results, as it was the first time I had processed 4X5 sheet film in almost 30 years.
The negatives are not too bad, but negatives look like negatives, and since I currently do not have a scanner that can scan 4X5 negatives, I photographed them on a soft box, then reversed two of the images into positives that are displayed below. The first photo of each pair is a shot of the emulsion side of the negative, which is not as reflective, but the images are reversed. The second photo of each pair is a shot of the negatives turned over so I’m shooting the shiny side of the negative. In all the photos below, my macro lens picked up the texture of the fabric cover on the soft box, so you can see texture in parts of the photos. The emulsion side of the negatives was easier to photograph because there was less glare, allowing the black background to be black. I had to hold the camera at a different angle to reduce the glare on the shiny side of the negatives as much as possible, which also created a much shorter depth of field on the second photo in each pair.
Zippy-Zee-Doo-Dah
Yippee ki-yay the zipper spider caught her a critter that she had all wrapped up and was having it for breakfast.
Argiope Aurantia
A argiope aurantia, better known around here as a zipper spider, has spun a web between the catio and a rosebush. It was in a position for me to get it profile.
Mushrooms
These may actually be “toadstools”, but since we’ve had all the rain, our yard is bursting with a variety of fungi. I find the blue mushrooms especially interesting and beautiful with their feathery texture and curled edges.
Rain Drops
Views of the yard through tiny rain drops.
Ladybug
I got up close and personal with a ladybug after going out to check the water level in the Rio Grande at 7:30 am. The river was back to normal with no indication that the water got higher than in was in my photos from yesterday’s blog. I was going to go out and see what the water level in the river was when I woke up at 2:00 am, but it was pouring rain, so I stayed in bed. We got another 3/4 inch of rain over night giving us a total of 9 inches for the year.
The white flower was blooming on the levee in the early morning and the rain drops on the roses where like viewing the world through tiny crystal balls with my macro lens.
SLF
Sandias, lizard, flowers (SLF). Laurie saw a baby lizard in the leaves under the bonsai stand on the deck. It was really cute and like most young folks these days, seemed to love being photographed as it moved out closer to my macro lens and hammed it up a bit. There was an alert for a missing child in Corrales this afternoon which had the Chanel 7 chopper circling around above us. I drove out to see if there was any action around the fire station, but nothing much was going on, so I drove north and got nice light on the Sandias. There was an alert on our phone when I got back that they found the missing child. Laurie planted a bunch of different flowers that started coming up in July, but the hail storms beat them down to the ground. They finally recovered and we now have a garden full of cosmos and other flowers. The birds and the bees are very happy.
Off Center & Not Even 