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Not Everyone's A Fan
It's hard to believe that anyone could not like my cats, but the squirrels that traverse our backyard are not big fans. During the warmer months, when I get home from work, I take the cats out into our fenced backyard and the squirrels will sometimes give us an earful. They can easily circle the edges of the yard by sticking to the top of the fence (as this one is doing), or by showing off their acrobatic prowess and jumping through the trees.
Like other urban areas in Oregon, the tree squirrels you'll find in Portland's neighborhoods and parks are likely to be introduced species like eastern grays and eastern foxes. |
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Adaptable
Raccoons have adapted incredibly well to the way that modern man has transformed the American landscape. In fact, it is estimated that there are more raccoons now than ever before. This one came into our backyard a few year’s ago, eating the raspberries growing near the fence. This picture was taken from our rear deck, it had crawled up to nap on the neighbor’s carport.
I haven’t seen it since, but I did once see some telltale footprints in the backyard … |
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Circle Jerk
One of the joys I find in wildlife photography is that, because you spend so much time in the field watching an animal, you get to study its behaviors and learn firsthand the many ways they have adapted to their environment. This applies just as much to macro photography as it does to traditional wildlife photography.
After I had been shooting bees on our coneflowers for a while in the summer of 2006, I noticed that the large bumblebees would sometimes use a special technique to collect nectar. While they would often just amble here and there about the cone, sometimes they would anchor one of their long back legs to a spike in the center of the flower and then swing themselves around the edge of the cone in a circle, collecting nectar as they went. In the words of a famous science officer: fascinating. |
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Rising Coneflower
I intentionally positioned my camera so that the bee would appear in front of the purple coneflower behind it, it reminded me of a large monster climbing over the earth (the cone of the coneflower in front) before the rising sun (the out-of-focus coneflower bloom).
I’m easily amused, in case you hadn’t noticed. |
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We Meet Again, Mr. Bee
These fascinating little creatures are my mortal enemy. It’s nothing personal and not even their fault, I just happen to be allergic to their stings. Makes your heart beat a little faster when you’re photographing them a few inches away.
This particular bumblebee was covered head to stinger in pollen from the many coneflower blossoms it had already visited. |
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And Now For Something Completely Different
When I first saw this little bee nestled between some purple coneflower petals, I knew I had a chance to take something other than the typical bee-on-a-coneflower picture.
However, all but the bee’s tail was in shadow, which usually calls for fill-flash to even out the exposure. The on-board flash would leave a strong reflected pattern in the bee’s eye and my external flash was too tall to penetrate the petals. A ring-flash would have been useful had I owned on. Rather than give up on the picture, I decided to combat the effect in software by using an extremely low contrast setting when I converted the RAW image. I positioned the lens so that there were only three areas of interest: the bee, the out-of-focus blue/green background, and the mostly out-of-focus pink petals of the coneflower arcing across the image. |
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Hold On! Don't Let Go!
A small bee struggles to avoid being pulled down to its death inside the carnivorous coneflower.
OK, so maybe coneflowers aren’t carnivorous. And maybe the bee isn’t struggling at all and it’s only the angle of the petals that suggests its about to fall into the fiery orange center. The petal above it helped hide the bee so that this was in fact a fairly secure place to hang out for a sleepy little bee. |
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Drift Net
A bee hangs lifelessly from a mint plant, two legs stuck to filaments from an abandoned spider’s web. A nearby bumblebee had met a similar fate, unable to escape from a single strand that was still stuck to the stem of the plant. At first I thought they might be alive, but it turned out that their bodies were just waving about in the gentle breeze. The scene reminded me of drift nets in the ocean indiscriminately killing the animals who get trapped in the nets and eventually die, their bodies slowly waving in the ocean currents.
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Personal Trainer
Our oldest cat Templeton likes to chase dragonflies around the yard. He never comes even remotely close to catching them, but he never gives up hope, and at least it gets him lots of exercise. There was one time when a mating pair of dragonflies almost flew right into him, focused more on sex than danger, but I saw what was happening and was able to restrain him from catching his prey.
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Liquid Gold
This little fellow landed on one of our rose bushes and sat still for a while, so I decided to take an enviromental macro portrait. It was sucking this drop of golden liquid in and out of its mouth — I’m not sure if the liquid is actually that color or if it was picking up reflections from the nearby plants.
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No Rules
I found this katydid on a rose bush beside our house, devouring a spent rose blossom. After taking some more traditional pictures from the side, I moved around in front and was delighted at what I saw. The rose petal it was eating was nearly vertical and by positioning myself just right, I could split the katydid down the middle with an eye on either side of the petal. The petal mostly obscures the katydid's formidable mandibles, giving it a less threatening look.
One of the things you learn as a young photographer is a few simple rules to improve your images, things like not putting your image dead center and instead following the rule of thirds. Things like never shooting macros handheld. As you grow as a photographer, you learn that the rules are not rules but suggestions and the key is to know when to break the rules. This rule-breaking macro is one of my favorite images. |
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A Sign
I’ve adopted a live-and-let-live policy towards the katydids in our yard. Unlike the swarms of little aphids, there aren’t very many of them and they don’t do much damage, so I tolerate a few chewed up plants in exchange for a few pictures. It’s actually more than a live-and-let-live policy, as when I trim the roses I try to make sure that any katydids on the cut stems make it safely back to the main plant before the stems go in the yard waste bin. The fact that I go to any effort to save the lives of some of my garden pests is probably a sign that I need to see a therapist.
This adult preferred the gladiolus over the roses, you can see a hole in the stem that it has gouged out. The flowers were already spent so it wasn’t really hurting anything. |
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A More Worrisome Sign
We’ve had two adult katydids this year, both of which are hanging around the side of the house where there are a handful of rose bushes and a few stray gladiolus (at least I think that’s what they are). This one prefers the gladiolus and is usually close enough to photograph, while the other prefers a particular rose bush where it is often nearly out of sight and too far away for pictures.
Given this, I’ve named them Katydid and Katydidn’t. Perhaps an even more worrisome sign than saving the lives of your garden pests is giving them nicknames. |
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Empathy Is A Dangerous Thing
One unexpected consequence of photographing the bugs of your yard is that you realize how splendid some of these creatures really are, such as this immature katydid. All of the details too small for the human eye are shown in their glory in the macro photograph.
Suddenly they are no longer an unseen pest wreaking havoc on the flowers of the garden, or even unseen predators of those pests. They will all suffer equally at the hands of a general-purpose insecticide. Empathy is a dangerous thing — something politicians and religious leaders have known for millenia — and while I’ve never been a big believer in widespread use of insecticides in my gardens, I’m even more hesitant to use it now. Perhaps too much so by the look of some of the plants … |
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I Am Become Death, Destroyer of Aphids
Sometimes seems that everything you see is an invasive species, even a ladybug in my yard that turned out to be an Asian species originally brought to America for pest control.
But this little ladybug, fierce and ferocious (if you’re an aphid), is not the same species! Have I finally found one of our native ladybugs? Alas, no, it has two spots too few. The seven-spotted ladybug is closely related to its American cousin the nine-spotted ladybug, but the nine-spot is rarely seen these days. The seven-spot is native to Europe and, like the Asian beetles, was brought over to the States for pest control and then established itself in the wild. This one established itself on the petals of my purple coneflower. But the aphids are on the roses! The roses! For the love of Sammy, the aphids are on the roses! Ah well, I’ve gotten a little disoriented in foreign lands myself. |
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A Change of Plans
I brought my camera and macro lens into the backyard with the hope of photographing some of the little greenish-white spiders that live in the coneflowers. They weren’t cooperating by posing on cones at the edge of the patch, so I started puttering around the yard.
While trimming one of my favorite rose bushes, I noticed this ladybug was on the underside of one of the leaves. I rescued it from the clippings and put it back on a rose petal. It was a real eye-opener when I looked at the pictures later. I had always assumed the black patches on the white middle section were its eyes, and was surprised to see its real eyes just below that section, two compound eyes much like a fly’s eyes. |
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An Unexpected Favorite
In a year in which I visited the Tetons and Yellowstone, I never expected one of my favorite wildlife pictures to be taken in my own backyard.
We’ve got at least a couple of different types of leafhoppers in our yard, with my favorite being these little green ones. I had spotted this one on a rose bush and decided to play around with some handheld macro pictures. Most macro pictures focus on high magnification, but since I was shooting handheld I shot more of an environmental macro. I used a shallow depth of field, which usually works against you in a macro picture but I love the way it turned the leaves and stems into an abstract of colors and shapes. |
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Hopping Stripes
Just like racing stripes make a car go faster, hopping stripes let you hop farther. I’ve no idea if they work, as this hopper never moved from the leaf while I photographed it.
Beautiful little thing though. |
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Man in the Hopper
Poets waxed about the man in the moon, but why not the man in the hopper? This little green leafhopper was on one of our rose bushes and I was intrigued by the yellow face on the hopper’s back.
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The Wrong Camoflage?
Viewed up close, it might seem like this leafhopper has the wrong camoflage — it would be invisible on a brown leaf, but easily visible on a green leaf as shown here. However, the camoflage actually works quite well even on a green plant. The hopper was tiny, so it looked like a little brown spot on the leaf and hardly worth a second glance.
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Mmmm, Minty!
A tiny little brown moth with its proboscis sticking down the blossom of one of our mint plants. The nectar it’s sucking down won’t taste minty of course, since the mint flavor comes from the leaves, but the moth seemed very fond of the mint plants and could often be found there. It didn’t stay still for long, making it extremely difficult to get any pictures. This one isn’t tack sharp but the best of many tries, and I do like the side view instead of the more common view of the wings from above.
Until we meet again my friend. |
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New Eyes
We called these daddy long-legs growing up. I’m not sure if it’s the same species as we had back east, and I don’t think they are true spiders, but then again I’m not an entomologist and don’t play one on TV. I didn’t even stay at a Holiday Express last night.
I was stunned when I looked at this picture in Photo Mechanic after I had downloaded it into my Powerbook. I had assumed the eyes would be out front near the jaws, to better see what it was eating, but the eyes are actually set up on the top of its body on a small bump, they are the little black dots about half way back on the body. It’s one of the joys of photography, to be able to take a close look at something you’ve seen all your life and see it with new eyes. |
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Yummy
This little spider eats a blackened mass of some insect(s) that it caught in its web, I’m sure if you’re a spider it’s quite tasty. I first found it on the underside of a leaf of one of our rose bushes, but these spiders are probably the most common in our yard and could be found in just about plant or structure. Most of them are on the small side like this one, but a couple of them have gotten so large they are a little frightening.
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Suspended
A spider hangs from its web and eats an insect that it captured. The spider made its web by attaching to a climbing rose bush on a trellis beside our house. The web was stretched out over a long distance and even the most gentle breeze would set the spider vibrating, so I had to wait a long time before I finally got one that wasn’t blurred by the wind.
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First Spider
My first spider of the year for 2007, this little green fellow was sitting on a leaf in one of my favorite rose bushes. I took a sequence of pictures that varied the depth-of-field, but I prefer this one which leaves parts of the background and spider blurred. I feel it lends it a bit of a dreamy quality, a fitting style for the stuff of nightmares.
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