Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.
My father drew this in his Sophomore Biology Laboratory Notebook:
Laboratory Study of the Grasshopper
Can you imagine the attention span required to draw that with no obvious errors? The next four pages contain a hand-written discussion of the grasshopper, with two corrections; he filled the entire notebook using a pen and four colors of fluid ink.
Here’s a closer look at the grasshopper (clicky for more dots):
The Grasshopper
I cannot imagine assigning that task to present-day students…
Things were different in 1927, when he was 17 years old. They were about to get really different; 15 years later he was in the South Pacific.
August was the month for giant orb weaving spiders; a pair of thumb-sized monsters took up residence under the gutter over the patio. One started by anchoring its web to the handrail by the steps:
Web anchor on handrail
While we like and encourage spiders, that anchorage didn’t last long and, yes, I must strip and repaint that railing…
There’s a horizontal web at the corner of the gutter over the back door:
Orb spider at gutter – light
Changing the exposure to favor the spider loses the web strands:
Orb spider at gutter – dark
Cropping that one down around the spider shows they really are the stuff of nightmare:
Orb spider – detail
The other spider prefers a vertical web attached along the gutter and anchored to a patio chair, which means I can get between the house and the web to see the spider’s tummy:
Orb spider – ventral
We leave the lights on in the evening for their benefit…
They’re heavy-bodied moths and, unlike those butterflies, never alight on the flowers to dine. Their wings are clear and never stop moving:
Hummingbird Moth – wing
It’s impossible to not see a face looking back at you, even though that’s a proboscis down the middle:
Hummingbird Moth – front
They don’t stay very long and are extremely flighty, so the picture are catch-as-catch-can: hand-held with the DSC-H5, roughly dot-for-dot crops, and only the last one got any color correction. I didn’t have time to set the usual one-stop underexposure, so the colors washed out a bit. I really like the first picture; almost all my mistakes canceled out.
The underwing shows four eye spots as distinguishing features:
Painted Lady – underwing
Painted Ladies have odd-looking “faces” on their front end:
Painted Lady – front
The proboscis works wonderfully well on deeper flowers than these, but they’re not passing anything up:
Painted Lady – proboscis
Another view:
Painted Lady – right side
The refueling tube stows neatly for flight:
Painted Lady – proboscis curled
One had a few notches taken from a wing:
Painted Lady – left rear
You can’t ask for prettier colors:
Painted Lady – right front
These are all hand-held with the DSC-H5 wearing the 1.7 teleadapter, underexposed by 1 stop to keep the dark background from burning out the butterfly colors. The images are very close to dot-for-dot crops from much larger pictures, with a touch of unsharp mask, and no color fiddling at all; bright daylight and a gorgeous subject come out beautifully!
Two turkey hens have formed a creche with seven chicks; if that seems a low number compared with the five in that clutch, we may have just seen the reason.
The turkey flock came foraging across the back yard one evening while we were eating supper on the patio:
Turkey Chicks – foraging
The hens began behaving oddly and the chicks went into periscope mode while looking in all directions at once:
Turkey Chicks – high alert
After a moment, we saw this tableau:
Red Fox and Turkey Hen
The red fox entered from the left, then made a great show of ignoring the turkeys while scratching an ear, licking its nuts, and examining the ground as the hens postured and threatened. The fox eventually trotted off to the right, through the grove in the rear, and away.
The flock required a few minutes to stand down from the alert:
Turkey Hen and Chicks – standing down
And then they moved on, searching for yummy things in the grass as usual…
The pictures are crap from the Canon SX230HS, hand-held at long telephoto, and ruthlessly cropped; the high-res originals aren’t much better than these. I’d expect better results in shaded sunlight, but for obvious reasons I couldn’t move any closer or pause to fetch a tripod. The fox tableau seems perfectly focused on the garden netting, which is what you’d expect from contrast-based autofocus; even if using manual focus would help, the bad picture you get is better than the good picture you didn’t.
This is the season for orb-weaving spiders, one of which laid a great web between a pole and the grass in the front yard. It worked wonderfully well to capture a flying katydid, but wasps got to the victim first:
Webbed katydid with wasps
Maybe a bird took out the spider? We’ll never know, but that katydid won’t go to waste.
This is a dot-for-dot crop from a handheld shot with the Canon SX230HS, macro setting, plus a dash of unsharp mask and gentle contrast stretching to knock the background down. It’s surprisingly hard to get perfect focus on a wind-blown object; this is the least awful of the group.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 