Following the ducks is a bit of “macro madness” — I found various interesting critters in the iris and roses. While I was out moving hoses to hook up drip systems, this female mallard hopped up on the neighbor’s wall. Then she hopped back down, and I could hear her making little quacking noises. When I looked over the wall, she was marching off with four ducklings in a row behind her.
Laurie called me out to photograph this very large jumping spider that was hanging out on a deckchair’s cushion. We suspect she’s pregnant. She was difficult to photograph in the low light because she didn’t want to hold still. Although she did stop and stare into the lens a couple of times with a questioning look on her face.
Our roses are starting to bloom and the ladybug larvae are working on the aphids.
Macro shots of fancy daffodils freshly watered.
I followed a honey bee around with my macro lens as it made its way through the peach blossoms.
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.
“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”.
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.
Yippee ki-yay the zipper spider caught her a critter that she had all wrapped up and was having it for breakfast.
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.
Off Center & Not Even 