Big Dingus

Yesterday was very pleasant, so I got out the Sigma macro lens and the “ring flash” and started looking for bugs. The first thing I found was a small spider on some big rosemary plants. He seemed to be repairing a web.

As usual I have no idea what sort of spider that is. The bright orange mark is what caught my eye. I think I’m going to send the photo in to What’s That Bug to see if they know. (Well now I know: it’s a Leucauge venusta, an “orchard spider”. This morning the web is looking very nice and neat.)

The Monarch Butterfly thing this year is weird. They’ve been all over the place, and in particular they found the newly-emerging milkweed in our back yard.

This one is getting started on a whole new milkweed plant, since he and his friends ate the leaves completely off the other plant. They and the black swallowtails are pigs.

Green beetle in a rose:

Bee on some marjoram:

I hooked up my homemade “ring flash” Amazon box the other day and took some pictures of emerging flowers. I wasn’t happy with any of them in the on-camera preview, but I finally got around to uploading them. This wasp one looked terribly blurred and over-exposed on the LCD, but it looks fine to me now.

The pear blossoms in which this wasp was cavorting have since dropped off the tree; it only takes a couple days. It’s not our tree; it’s in the neighbor’s yard. It produces a tremendous number of pears. They don’t taste like anything at all when they’re ripe off the tree (July), but my brother-in-law told us to put them in the refrigerator for a couple weeks. After such treatment the pears get a lot sweeter.

This wasp was a little thing; the blossoms are at most an inch across when they’re open.

I got an OK picture of a mutabilis rose blossom too. The background is black because the ring flash doesn’t cast enough light to expose stuff not really close to the lens.

OK so here’s the home-made ring flash. Ingredients:

• One small Amazon book box
• 2 Quantaray slave strobes
• 2 plastic strap ties
• 1 rubber band
• 1 piece of random white-ish cotton cloth
• Aluminum foil
• Duct tape

(Credit to Pat for most of the assembly photos.)

Holes are cut in the back of the box, one in the middle for the lens and then two on each side for the strobes:

The strobes fit on the back such that the flashy part kind-of pokes into the holes. Plastic strap things hold them in place:

On the front is some cloth. It’s got a frilly pattern woven into it, but I don’t think that’s important:

The lens pokes through the back, and the box fits more-or-less snugly over the filter:

The lens hood is screwed on (yes, screwed) and a rubber band holds the cloth flaps:

Here you can see the catchlight from the contraption:

That’s all there is to it. I can shoot at 1/160, f10 to f16, depending on how close I am. That gives more depth of field than I’ve gotten with daylight. Gallery from this afternoon, immediately following the (re-)assembly of the ring flash:

(That’s a “Batfaced Cuphea” flower; I didn’t notice the aphids until I saw it on the screen.)

For Melissa, tourmaline with amethyst:

Wulfenite:

Dioptase (I think; might be diopside but the crystals seem too big):

Galena (perhaps with sphalerite but I don’t know):

Actually just the pictures are big.



These were taken with the Sigma 105 and a home-made “ring flash.” The flash consists of an Amazon book box with the flaps cut off. Through the back (well, the bottom of the box), two holes were cut so that the flash “windows” of two Quantaray cheap-o slave flash units can poke through. The flash units were strap clamped to the box. There’s a round hole in the middle of the box that just fits over the end of the lens (actually it’s over the UV filter). The lens hood holds it in place, sort-of. Then there’s a piece of thin cotton fabric duct-taped over the front (top) of the box, and through a hole in the middle of it pokes the lens hood. Maybe I should take a picture of it.



I don’t know what either of those two things are, exactly. I’ve seen that species of dragonfly a couple of times however, and I have another good picture I got with the Olympus 50mm lens.

I don’t have any idea what kind of spider this is. Strangely, I could find no good spider identification site on the net. There are a couple, but they’re not easy to use, and in any case I couldn’t find anything close to this one.

Taken with my E-500, 50mm lens, and a cheap-o off-camera Quantaray flash with a Photoflex umbrella diffuser. It started to rain while I was taking the picture, so the umbrella was handy. The background is dark because it’s relatively distant dirt unilluminated by the flash.

I want to see if I can find a good simple optical slave hot-shoe trigger, so that I can use my old OM series flash instead of the wimpy Quantaray. That’d let me crank down the aperture a couple of stops (I think) and give me a little more depth-of-field.

Belated Update

The spider, apparently named “Samson”, with some sort of flying ant creature.