The Urban Pantheist

These little black aphids are feeding on our nasturtiums. I was aiming to get a good sharp view of them and ended up with something softer and more impressionistic.

I figured out that I could use my camera in its macro setting with the lens zoomed in. It doesn't make for great photos, but I did capture this brutal vignette from a battle between two pavement ant colonies.

Here again I'm testing the camera's macro ability--these are lichens and mosses growing on the surface of a storm drain. I'll have to assume here that the mosses started it, and then the lichen fungi found the moss covered metal to be close enough to earth to colonize. My field guide doesn't have a section on lichens growing on steel. These are probably Cladonia sp., but again I'd love input from the real experts.


This crustose lichen on smooth tree bark is probably something in Lecidela, Lecidea, or Porpidea.

This young Phiddipus audax is fascinated with its reflection in this coffee mug!


Suddenly it noticed me standing behind with a camera!

Sorry, been trying to catch up with pictures so it probably seems excessive by now. One thing I've noticed is that I kind of accidentally changed the aspect ratio of my pictures, so that the last few are in the cinemascope ratio while previous to that they were like television. I have to say, this one little change makes me like the pictures better--don't know if there's an actual qualitative difference, but I'm happy for now.

I'd be curious to know if you guys noticed or think there's anything better about each aspect ratio set. Any opinions?

Happy Saturday! Howsabout a bunch of dog pics from the back yard? How about if I was messing with the settings on my camera seeing what weird effects were possible? Are you in?

( here you go! )

Here's a very random set of photos that are in my folder preventing me from doing anything else until I post them. This first one is an ant doing something weird, I think tending a scale insect to get honeydew, but I've never really seen a scale insect and don't know if that's what this is.

( Read more... )

I love the longlegged flies in my yard--they especially seem to like hanging out on the grape leaves in the morning.


I think this one is the same species as the first one.


I keep posting stuff on bugguide and the same guy keeps dismissing me summarily. My current camera and lens combination doesn't allow for very clear macro shots, I know this. His profile makes him sound a bit arrogant, so I'm trying not to take it personally. Part of me wants to get a good macro lens and blow him away with my amazing skill, but part of me thinks he wouldn't be impressed regardless, and why would I want to impress him anyway?

So, remember that I said one of my goals for the year was to get one of my photographs from work published? It happened today, completely by accident, with two blurry pictures of the baby gorilla procedure. See them here. It was dark in there, and I didn't want to use the flash, so these pics are taken at about an eighth of a second. Dan, the with the curly hair and headband holding the baby, was trying to make be crack up by looking all sexy like at the camera. I took a bunch of much more interesting photos, but they can't be used because they look like we are torturing the baby--seven zookeepers holding her down while the vet tries to get blood out of her. (The baby gorilla is amazingly strong, and needed to be completely immobilized to safely draw blood.)

One of the responsibilities of my job is to treat all of the storm drains and catch basins with mosquito larvicide (a synthetic hormone that prevents mosquito larvae from growing up into bloodsucking disease spreading adults). Every year I have to find them all, every year I surely miss some, and every year I find some new ones. Last year I got a copy of a blueprint for the zoo, so that I could create a map of the storm drains. But the blueprint is huge and unwieldy--how can I make it portable. I remembered back when I published a comic book, and I haunted reprographic places; they made blueprint-sized copies on giant machines at some of them, but they were very expensive. They basically used a big camera to take a picture...oh, right.

I realized that technology has changed in the past 18 years, and that I actually had the means to do the same thing, right there in my office. I took a series of photos with my digital camera, uploaded them and printed them. The quality isn't great, and I'll need to take some detail shots of areas of the zoo where the drains are densely packed, but I can't believe it took me so long to figure it out.