Some of these were taken with a canon 5Dii, can you tell which ones? Been borrowing someone's fujifilm x100. I have to say the camera is a joy to use. I wish it had a faster start up when you use cheap memory cards but besides that no real complaints. I have noticed it handles color different from my 5Dii. The files come out cool and with hard to correct greeness to them. Not necessarily bad, just different.
Something they don't warn you about Macro
Truly my camera hates me
So many of us are very familiar with sensor aids, those wonderfully awful spots and smudges in the smooth swathes of blue in our sky. The spots come from dust and other particles resting on our sensor. They show up at smaller apertures and easiest seen in areas of continuous tone (hence why they're commonly scene in the skies of landscapes). For macro, where we find ourselves descending to smallest of apertures to give us all the depth the lens can muster and even then suffer from the shallowest of dofs giving us creamy bokeh the problem becomes most acute.
In the example to the left is a particularly bad case. It was also cleaned with large printing in mind so fainter and smaller particles had to be removed then you would have to for web presentation. When you darken areas the dust becomes further apparent. There several tools available to us to expedite the process. Both in camera and in image processor are tools where you can record dust data which can automatically deal with the worst of it. The finer grains still need to be done manually and the processor can make poor healing choices (especially if it's cleaning up over a detail area). You can also clean your sensor. Using one of those hand-squeeze blowers you can knock the worst off and if you have the gumption you can could wet clean your sensor with the swabs available on the market. Regardless, if you shoot macro be ready to spend some time cleaning the image.
How bad is your camera aids?
Curious to know if you camera has it bad? Here's an easy way to check.
1) Pick a lens that you have with with smallest aperture (probably f22 or f32) and set it to that
2) Turn off auto focus and focus the lens to as a close a distance as you can (aka macro focus)
3) Pick an even white surface like a wall or sheet or paper and move a few feet away placing it well out of focus
4) Take a shot and pixel peep away on your computer
More Mantises!
More Mantises
Sibylla pretiosa
Cryptic Mantis
Sibylla pretiosa
Cryptic Mantis
My other two mantises finally arrived, another Indian Flower Mantis and my long desired Orchid Mantis. Both are now two molts into their life cycle and doing very well. I'm considering after this batch of mantises obtaining ootheca for orchid and ghost mantises and just raising those two species for awhile. I would be interested in breed and maintaining colonies of both.
The orchid mantis is exceedingly easy to photograph. Not really skiddish at all and will acknowledge and look at the camera without becoming defensive. It did become startled once while shooting which caused it to flatten itself as much as possible, laying it's thorax on ground with its arms splayed out and its abdomen folded up over its thorax. Then it stared most intently at me. It was shockingly adorable. Unfortunately about halfway through the shoot it started to defecate, which I didn't notice till later. You can see it in one of the pictures of him here.
Hymenopus coronatus
Malaysian Orchid Mantis
I also finally got a few good pictures of my Cryptic Mantis. For whatever is chose to hold still for 1-2 minute periods of time this go around. Got a few good face shots and some excellent full body shots. I had to redo his enclosure, he keeps picking the worst spots to shed and it makes it very dangerous for him. The orchid mantis had similar poor choices for shedding locations but also came out just fine. One of my classmates has requested the skins. I have no idea what she's doing with them but she had a delightful sideways mode of asking if she can have them. She also wants the corpses when they finally die. I would find this strange but art school in San Francisco, nothing is really all that odd here.
Now that I have two Indian Flower mantises I'm going to set up the colors in their enclosures differently and see how far they'll shift color wise. The first one has already shifted quite strongly towards green.
I've also got quite bit more work done on photoshoping mantises into paintings, but the corresponding portrait work is not ready yet. I printed a few of them and the heads separated themselves quite strongly in comparison to on the screen. That's always the problem is how they look when printed. The unrefined paintings are particularly hard because I have try to roughen up the photo in a fashion similar to the target painting. I'll make a post of them when more are ready.
Hymenopus coronatus
Malaysian Orchid Mantis
Creobroter pictipennis
Indian Flower Mantis
