The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning
Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
Taking & making images.
Four of these ferocious Parsley Worms were chowing down on a volunteer dill plant along the garden fence:
Amazingly, they turn into Black Swallowtail butterflies that sometimes visit the Butterfly Bush outside our living room window. Well, maybe not this one, but certainly some of its relatives.
We don’t hassle them; they have a fearsome threat display that apparently works wonders on their natural predators.
The water collected in nasturtium leaves after a shower looks like droplets of mercury:
They refract outdoor lighting when seen from the correct viewpoint:
These were at the Morse Estate. Hand-held with the Canon SX230HS in low light conditions.
We don’t often see Turkey Vultures on the ground, so this gathering was unusual:
The depression in the grass suggests something keeled over right there; perhaps they’re rummaging around for leftovers. Although they’re totally graceless on foot, it works well enough for them.
There were two vultures on posts when I stopped, but one joined the ground party before I could deploy the camera. The other bird kept a close eye on me throughout the proceedings:
Look alive!
Pix from the Canon SX230HS, zoomed to its optical limit, and certainly not prizewinners…
I carry the Canon SX230HS in my pocket, so as to have a decent camera ready when it’s needed; yes, it’s in a cloth case. Unfortunately, in recent weeks a tiny hair made its way into the lens stack, where it shows up as a slight blurring just left of center in high f/stop images:
With the camera attached to the stereo zoom microscope, the hair becomes painfully obvious:
Of course it’s in the middle of the image. [sigh]
A bit of searching turns up a bootleg technique to remove the front lens from the turret (basically, just twist and pull), but neither of the internal lens surfaces thus revealed lie near a focal plane and, in any event, were surprisingly clean. The hair is probably lodged just in front of the image sensor, most likely stuck to the back of the final lens where it casts a shadow on the sensor. If it wandered around you’d call it a floater.
Dismantling the entire camera and opening the lens stack seems fraught with peril, particularly as the camera pretty much still works fine for normal picture-taking. More pondering is in order…
Late August is, as always, the season for giant orb-weaving spiders, one of which spun a web between two tall cactus plants on the patio and greeted us with this sight one morning:
We’re big fans of both spiders and dragonflies, but it was obvious who came out on top in this contest:
These things are unimaginably weird:
Even with the spider busy at lunch, she has four eyes to spare. They reflect the flash and appear as white-centered dark dots near the middle of the image:
I’m sure the red spinnerets are diagnostic:
The spider tossed the empty husk over the side, then spent the next two nights and days parked in her lair, presumably digesting that big meal, and didn’t bother repairing the web:
She spun a fresh web on the third night and caught a more manageable insect:
All hand-held with the Sony DSC-H5, some with a 2x close-up lens. All the pix are tight crops, crushed to fit my arbitrary 750 pixel maximum and 200 kB size limit. If you need high-res original images for anything, drop me a note; I took far too many pictures of this encounter…
These bits of flying jewelry enjoy the Butterfly Bush out front:
This one has lost both “swallowtails” and a chunk of its left wing. The blue spots indicate it’s a female; we hope it laid a bunch of eggs in the magnolia bush next door…
The Giant Swallowtails once again returned to the Butterfly Bush at the front window this year:
Their wings never stop fluttering while they feed:
I’ve never seen butterfly wings in this position:
All hand-held with the Sony DSC-H5 and no additional lenses. The top picture was underexposed by two stops to remove the background. The bottom picture has fill flash in addition to full sun backlight.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 