macro photography – Don't hold your breath

What’s the subject today?

Maybe a simple macro of May’s flowers growing by the roadside in the charming Baltic town of Lübeck. Or maybe a little more about it. I have no idea why my eyes light on one thing rather than another, why I find one thing more attractive than something else. But if I want to show you what I find interesting, then I will try to make it singular, give it the focus of my, and your, attention. The simplest way to do that in a photo is to focus the lens on it and blur everything else. If it is small enough, then macro mode works best, and that’s what you see in the photo above. Of course, with today’s phone cameras and their resident AI/ML slaves, you can choose your focus after taking the photo.

Maybe you want to play games instead. Focus on something which is not really what you want to show. Here is an example. Show this, and most people will first look inside the frame. Ah ha, leisure time in the sun. And then they’ll look at the frame and ask, where is Travemünde? It’s a nice beach by the Baltic sea, but that’s not the story. The story is the empty frame. Why is it there, with nothing really to frame in it? (You can see that I had to stand off on one side to frame the loungers.) Something has been removed. You could follow up in a long blog post which solves the mystery. So here the composition of the photo is totally deceptive, like a classic mystery story by Agatha Christie or John Dickson Carr.

And here is another sleight of the hand with focus. The fountain in the lovely village of Cochem, on the banks of the Mosel, is topped by a sculpture of St. Martin cutting his cloak in half to share with a poor man shivering in the cold. It was awfully cold and rainy when I took this photo, but that is not the story either. It was hard to get this photo to work. The square is too small to blur out the background, not that I wanted to. So I played with saturation and exposure, partly desaturating the background, and lightening the sculpture. There’s only so much you can do with a badly lit scene unless you use AI/ML tools. But the photo is misdirection again. I wanted to show the charming half-timbered renaissance houses which give the square its character. Taking their photo would have been pretty flat, so I tried out this method. I hope this postcard is more full of movement. I wish it had been full of sunshine too, but that’s May.

Curve with curves

A stalk of grass bends into a gentle curve because it is a little overloaded with the weight of the flowers that it holds. My first thought was that these would be wind pollinated, like many of the other tall grasses that I’ve seen. But the spiderweb along the stalk told me that it could actually be pollinated by insects, unless the spider is confused. That web is meant to catch visiting pollinators. There are so many little curves inside each line of reasoning that we bring to understanding nature.

Things which deserved a close look: Macro Monday

“Why have you stopped looking at things closely?” When The Family asked that question I didn’t have a reply, perhaps because I hadn’t even considered that I’d undergone such a transition. “Have I?” I asked. After all I’d just taken the photo of (possibly) an animal with an exoskeleton which you see above. But later I realized that I hadn’t noticed the thing really. What I’d noticed was The Guru saying that it wasn’t a seed, it was a rolled up pill millipede (superorder Oniscomorpha). Someone else had picked it up from the ground thinking it was a seed and was rolling it around on his palm when The Guru saw it. We didn’t stay to look at it unfold and move away.

On the other hand, the photo above is of something I not only noticed, but could identify. The Common sailer (Neptis hylas) is a butterfly found right across the country and in Nepal, Bhutan, and east into southeast Asia. I have an enormous number of photos of it, and when I saw it glide past me with its usual lazy wingbeats, I looked to see where it sat so that I could add its photo to my collection.

I followed that up by taking a photo of the butterfly that you see here. Google lens pointed me to the Tawny coster (Acraea terpsicore), but its wing markings are different enough that I’m sure it is not. But once you have a starting genus, identification becomes a little easier. A directed search then led me to a positive identification as a Yellow coster (Acraea issoria).

It may be possible to identify butterflies down to species level, but when it comes to moths, I can only tell whether or not I’ve seen it before. This one, with its lovely white-on-white veins and pinkish yellow head and body is certainly one I haven’t. It is one of the many animals of Bhutan that I will leave unidentified even after looking at it closely.

Black and White

It is that time of the year again. Just for the record.

The insect apocalypse

Walking along a road in Bhutan I saw this injured beetle ferrying its grubs across the tarmac. Although it is likely that it was injured by a thrush, the sight reminded me of the terrifying tales of the insect apocalypse which appear in the media. A few years ago an article syndicated by Reuters started “As a boy in the 1960s, David Wagner would run around his family’s Missouri farm with a glass jar clutched in his hand, scooping flickering fireflies out of the sky … That’s all gone.” Farmlands are impoverished ecosystems, although less so than the towns which are replacing them slowly. The press office of the Princeton University made public an article which said “Every spring an extraordinary event takes place in California, when 1600 beekeepers arrive at the Central Valley’s almond orchards—along with 1.5 million hives. It’s the biggest pollination event on the planet as the orchards turn white with blossom. But the Central Valley is such a toxic soup of pesticides, the beekeepers lose about 1/3 of their bees during each pollination season.” These captive pollinator bees have been deliberately bred to lose much of their genetic variability, much as Dole’s banana farms constitute monoculture.

A special report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science had a more nuanced view. It noted that insect populations are declining, just as animals from other taxa are. But it observed “Not all insects are declining. Four papers in this special issue note instances of insect lineages that have not changed or have increased in abundance. Many moth species in Great Britain have demonstrably expanded in range or population size. Numerous temperate insects, presumably limited by winter temperatures, have increased in abundance and range, in response to warmer global temperatures. Anthropophilic and human-assisted taxa, which include many pollinators, such as the western honey bee (Apis mellifera) in North America, may well thrive due to their associations with humans. Increasing abundances of freshwater insects have been attributed to clean water legislation, in both Europe and North America. In some places, native herbivores have flourished by utilizing nonnative plants as adult nectar sources or larval foodplants, and there are even instances where introduced plants have rescued imperiled species.”

Over our ten days in the heavily forested country of Bhutan, we found that insects thrive. Not only did I manage to photograph a variety of them, I was also left with bites of many different types of insects. When we talk about the impending insect apocalypse, we have in mind fireflies, butterflies and bees, not the midges, ants, ticks and mosquitoes which plague us. In reality, habitat loss affects not only the species we love but all kinds of species: insect, weeds, trees, mammals, birds, lichen, moss.

Emotions recollected in tranquility

Wordsworth explained the process of creating poetry as beginning with the contemplation of emotions by a tranquil mind. In a preface to one of his books of poetry he explained that the composition of a poem can only be achieved by a calm mind, even though the poem has to express deep emotion. One may say the same of photography. How can you compose good images, control the behaviour of a complex machine, without a serene and detached mind? The featured photo is a contemplation of bad weather through the windows of a convention center in Busan in the middle of a November. The weather was blustery and cold, but there was no action visible. I decided to let the horizontal bands of colour speak for themselves.

Another kind of bad weather is the monsoon in August. It is perfectly feasible to walk out into the pouring rain: it is not cold, after all. But an umbrella provides little shelter. Wet clothes and shoes are uncomfortable. So, on a holiday you may prefer to sit indoor in peace and quiet, contemplating the rain. A photo of this state of mind is what I wanted when I composed this image of raindrops on delicate white petals blooming in my balcony.

September, the Indian Summer, is completely different. The humid warmth is uncomfortable, but plants see this as the beginning of autumn. A walk in the garden can be a wonderful sight once you let go of the notion of beauty propagated in glossy magazines. There is a beauty in the drying leaves, in their spotty colours, and in the different insects that put in an appearance when the rains are on their way out. It is not the death of a garden, merely a transition between flowers. There is calmness in contemplating this change.

A similar, but different, creative impulse lies behind the crafting of Japanese sweets. Here is one called Kamome no Tamago (literally, Seagulls’ Eggs) from Iwate prefecture. The out shell of white chocolate hides a thin layer of sponge cake holding within it a mixture of egg yolk and sweet white bean paste. The pounding of surf near a seagull’s nest is what this sweet evokes for me. But it is something that I then enjoy in a calm setting.

Silent Saturday

Silence is golden, they say. So are marigolds.

Silky Saturday

One of the interesting things about plants is that when you magnify any part of it enough, it starts looking hairy. The technical botanical term is tomentose. In botanical descriptions, the word is used to describe hairs which can be seen by eye, or felt by running fingers over a surface. But even when a part of a plant is said to be glabrous, meaning smooth, at sufficient magnification you can usually see hairs. At that scale these hairs are always silky smooth to the eye, like in the photo above.

Jewel Bug on Succulent

Take someone as ignorant about plants as me and show him an insect crawling over flowers in a garden. What you will get is an identification of the insect. In this case it is a green jewel bug (Chrysocoris stollii), a pest that drinks the sap of plants. It belongs to the family Scutelleridae, a metallic shield bug. But the plant with the wonderful flowers? No idea at all.

Thank you for the flower identification, AB. Now I will know a Guatemalan Rhubarb (Jatropha podagrica) when I see it again.

Marigold and Tiger

Marigolds were in bloom when I walked out to the garden. February is a good time for butterflies. Many of them fluttered around the flowers. I got a Glassy tiger (Parantica aglea) sitting on one. Mission accomplished. I went back to the lectures. I can’t sit for long stretches in a cold lecture hall. I know it looks impolite, so I try to make my breaks short.