Michael Hampson Photography

New Photos, 9/3/10

mike@michaelhampson.com (Michael) — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 15:24:00 +0000

The photos I've added to my gallery this week are from a trip to visit family in upstate New York. My parents get a lot of bees and butterflies in their yard, so it's usually a good opportunity to get something interesting while I'm there.

Swarms of bumblebees were crawling into these flowers before they opened each morning. The rustling sound and weird mouth-like movement of the bud was very much like something out of Little Shop of Horrors.

I always see these brassy sweat bees when I'm there.

This fritillary was a nice surprise. Very bold, really didn't mind having its picture taken.

jupiter and moons

mike@michaelhampson.com (Michael) — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 03:09:00 +0000

jupiter and moons
Originally uploaded by mehampson

Jupiter is rising early these days, the brightest object in the night sky besides the moon. I mounted my 70-200mm on a tripod, and though it's not what I'd call a functional astrophotography setup, I love that I was able to get a clean shot of several of Jupiter's moons.

This image is very heavily cropped. 200mm did not get me very close to Jupiter. Even still, this little white blob is about 300 times the mass of Earth.

It reminds me a bit of an opportunity I had in college to visit a radio telescope observatory. They had some optical telescopes, much more powerful than anything I'd ever played with at home, and Saturn was visible the night we were there. It's honestly one of the most amazing things you could hope to see: this unimaginably giant planet, with pale desaturated brown and tan bands and huge wide rings, with bright little moons hanging next to it, the whole thing tiny but crystal clear in the eyepiece.

I wish I lived in a place where light pollution didn't drown out everything dimmer than a low-flying airplane. The actual beauty of these planets seen in person -- naked eye or telescope -- is completely unlike anything else. The sense of distance, uncrossable distance, is profound and I think quite necessary.

New Photos

mike@michaelhampson.com (Michael) — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 17:41:00 +0000

Sorry for the lack of posts lately -- been a hectic couple of weeks. Lots of work, lots of back and forth, and very little time to sit down to get through photos. But here's a few that I added to my gallery this week.

Long-horned bee

mike@michaelhampson.com (Michael) — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 15:29:00 +0000

A male long-horned bee, possibly in the genus Melissodes, drinks nectar from a sunflower. The long-horned bees, or Eucerini, are a large tribe of solitary bees that dig nests; like most solitary bees the actual nesting habits varies from species to species, but none of them build the huge nests we associate with honey bees. And none of them have the same complex social structure with queens, workers, and drones. The Eucerini get their name from the extremely long antennae of the males: the word itself means "true horn".

I see large crowds of these bees on sunflowers near me, especially in mid to late summer. The males hang out and drink nectar, and wait for a chance to mate with females who stop by for a break in their constant pollen-gathering. They start early and work at it all day: I walked past some at about 8:30am this morning and there were several females with heavily-loaded pollen baskets. A few miner bees and tiny sweat bees as well.

I took this shot yesterday afternoon. It's at a 1:1 magnification ratio, so just the macro lens without any tubes. The flash, a Canon 430EX II, is mounted on a bracket I put together, and shot through a diffuser made out of an old yogurt cup and Rosco diffusion paper. Unfortunately, right after I finished with these bees and started walking to the next place I hoped to find bees, the off-camera cord I had the flash mounted on literally ripped off of its threaded mounting post, and bungeed down onto the street. No damage, I think, since the coil-cord slowed its fall, but it's making me seriously rethink the value of using the cord's hotshoe as a mount: obviously there's too much flex and stress with the flash's center of gravity so much higher than where it's secured.

The identification of this bee proves difficult. I got several clear shots of the wing venation, an important characteristic to select between the hundreds of species of bees in New England, and one or two showing the color and texture of the thorax very nicely. With this, I used the bee genera guide at discoverlife.org to narrow it down to a few species in several genera that don't really look like perfect fits -- different proportions and eye color, for example -- or one eleven species in the genus Melissodes, which I think this probably is. The guides at discoverlife.org are highly detailed keys that need more knowledge than I actually have, not to mentioned a mounted specimen and a microscope, to take full advantage of, but it's still extremely useful in drilling down with the right shots. Once I repair my rig, I plan to go back to these flowers at night to shoot them sleeping -- the males really don't seem to leave -- and hopefully get a few other details that will help confirm the ID.

Under construction

mike@michaelhampson.com (Michael) — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 19:20:00 +0000

I'm doing some renovations to my blog and gallery. In case you happen to visit while I'm experimenting and things look really broken or just plain gross, this is why -- it's only temporary.

Lucanus capreolus

mike@michaelhampson.com (Michael) — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 02:39:00 +0000

Reddish-brown stag beetle
Lucanus capreolus

Here's a big little beast. This reddish-brown stag beetle is about an inch long, with a thick, deep red body and huge mandibles. They look like an over-grown, over-armored army ant, but in fact the jaws are not terribly powerful. (From what I hear -- I haven't been pinched by one personally.) The beetle doesn't need them to be: the adults feed on tree sap, and the females have little nubbins instead. Well, really the females have normally-proportioned mandibles for a beetle of their quite large size, but in comparison to the males', they look a bit dwarfish.

Given that these oversized mandibles are useless for foraging and impractical for defense, and that it's the males who lug them around, you can immediately guess what they're for: wrestling. They fight over breeding territory, and the biggest mandibles gets the ladies. After mating, the female lays her eggs in rotten wood, which feeds the larvae as they grow over the next few years.

I found this particular guy upside-down on the sidewalk, fairly early in the morning. They're crepuscular animals, meaning they come out at dawn and dusk, so he was probably wrapping up his morning activity. No idea how he got flipped over, but they're not very graceful fliers, and he may have just tired himself out. They seem to play dead when on their back, like many insects, but I wonder if that's a defensive response or if they just take a moment to gather their strength. At any rate, I brought him home and stuck him in a clean plastic cup, with some paper towels for cover, and gave him a few drops of sugar water later on.

To shoot him, I turned a small cardboard shipping box into a lightbox, by cutting away a few extra sides and flaps, taping white printer paper along the inside, and covering the top with Rosco 1/4 Tough diffusion paper. I put the 430EX II on a light stand directly overhead, and used the WhiBal to nail the color temperature down and get the exposure in the right ballpark. I took a few shots at 1:1 with the 100mm Macro, and made a series of four verticals to merge into a hi-res horizontal, but he moved around a bit as I was shooting and they don't have a consistent focal point. This is one of them.

Identification was simple. Any huge beetle with huge mandibles is probably one of the stag beetles (Lucanidae), and we only have a few in New England. Lucanus capreolus is dark red, with a lighter yellow thigh. I was pretty confidant after flipping through Marshall's guide, and then checked the key on bugguide.net to confirm it. There's another species, L. elaphus, with even larger mandibles, but the ones on this guy are only about as long as the pronotum (the head). It's not visible in this image, but he has fan-shaped clubs at the end of the antennae, the eyes are slightly divided by a little protrusion called a canthus, and the surface of the pronotum and the elytra (the wing covers) are pretty smooth. All these things say Lucanus, and rule out other related stag beetles.

Photos from this week

mike@michaelhampson.com (Michael) — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 16:36:00 +0000

Some new photos from this week:

Scytodes thoracica

mike@michaelhampson.com (Michael) — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 04:43:00 +0000

Spitting Spider
Scytodes thoracica

This handsome little spider is, literally, a spitting spider. Their silk glands are located next to the venom glands in their head (well, the cephalothorax), instead of the abdomen, like many more common spiders. They don't spin webs at all, preferring to stalk their prey at night. Once they've gotten close enough, about a centimeter or so, they spray a line of venomous liquid silk from their fangs, snaring the prey. And then they eat it.

This is the first spitting spider I've ever seen. I pulled out a bowl for some cereal, and lo and behold, there was a spider with these really neat markings in it. Nature is everywhere, even the cupboard. It's a very small spider: this photo was taken at 2:1. I used the Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM lens on extension tubes, lit with a 430EX II. The flash was shot through a 43" umbrella mounted on a lightstand; ordinarily I would say that's an impractical setup for macro, but the spider wasn't going anywhere and I had the whole thing set up in the living room already, except for the lens. Post-shoot wrap-up consisted of tossing the spider outside and getting a new bowl for the cereal.

It was a pretty straightforward animal to ID. The distinctive markings would have made it easy if I had known about this species, but I didn't and so purposefully ignored them: the spider was small enough to be a juvenile of one of the more common kinds I see around the house, and color patterns are really variable in many spiders. Judging by the large cephalothorax (the front section, with the legs), I didn't expect it to be a weaver. The eyes jumped out at me though, definitely not a jumping spider. There are six: a pair of median eyes in the center, and a pair of lateral eyes high on each side of the median eyes, partially hidden in the dark bands. So I turned to BugGuide's guide to spider eye arrangements, got momentarily concerned because of the resemblance to the recluse spiders, and then found the species immediately when I checked the Scytodidae. There's only one genus and a few species, and as it turns out, the markings for S. thoracica actually do look pretty useful for identification.

New photos this week

mike@michaelhampson.com (Michael) — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 17:22:00 +0000

Here are a few photos I've added to my image gallery this week.

Flowers

mike@michaelhampson.com (Michael) — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 22:59:00 +0000

Some recent flower photographs:

Manual or TTL flash for macro?

mike@michaelhampson.com (Michael) — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 23:50:00 +0000

Green metallic bee
Originally uploaded by mehampson

Having switched from a manual to a TTL flash for my bug macro work, I do really appreciate the consistency it gives me between shots. I very rarely have to seriously adjust the exposure in post -- or if I do, it's the same adjustment across a series.

Having 2nd curtain sync is great, too. I've definitely gotten shots with visible motion blur that are usable, even pretty good, but where I can tell that I would have junked it using 1st curtain sync. The difference is in 1st curtain sync, the flash makes the exposure and then any motion gets exposed while the shutter is still open, so the blur is actually leading the motion; in 2nd curtain sync, the motion is exposed before the flash fires, so any blur is trailing the motion, like our brains expect. The image with this post is a good example: I've gotten many photos of sweat bees with leading blur that would have looked fine with trailing blur.

TTL flashes can be used as manual flashes, are generally built better, and generally have a better manufacturer's warranty if you get them new. The only real downside is the major price difference, which can be really significant when you're comparing a $40 Yongnuo with a $280 Canon. So the benefits are real and noticeable, but whether they're worth paying $240 for is definitely going to be an individual call.

But my real point here is that there are two things I've noticed lately that may not be obvious to someone considering what kind of flash to buy for shooting insects.

The first is that TTLs fire a pre-flash, which they use to gauge how much light to put out, and then the camera opens the shutter and fires the actual flash pulse. This happens nearly instantly. But some insects, like smaller flies, are actually so fast that they can be startled by the pre-flash and fly away before the actual flash fires -- especially if you're shooting with 2nd curtain sync, where there's an extra 1/250th of a second to react in. Manual flash doesn't have this problem.

The other gotcha is that you can't always tell if your flash is positioned efficiently. On a manual flash, it's obvious if the flash gets out of position, because you start underexposing; if you don't change the setting, it's not going to change itself just because the sensor wants more light. But that's exactly what a TTL flash does.

You might be thinking, "and that's why I want one", but it's not. You want TTL to automatically deal with changes in scene: changes in focal distance as you back away just a bit, changes in the leaves around the subject as they blow in and out of frame, changes in composition as you follow an ant across a white flower, etc. But you want to know the flash is shooting roughly where you want it, somewhere around 1/32nd to 1/8th power, to take advantage of the fastest flash pulse you can. When you start shooting at 1/4, 1/2, full power because you're only catching the subject with the dimmer edge of the flash beam, the exposure is basically slowing down and you start recording a lot more movement. Motion blur becomes very noticeable. On top of that, the flash takes longer to recycle, and it obviously drains the batteries faster.

I get around this by checking every now and then by switching over to manual to see what power level I'm basically firing at. If you've been shooting with a TTL speedlight and you've found some of your bug shots are inexplicably blurry from time to time, this might be the problem.

Neither of those two things are deal breakers for me. In fact, I doubt they'd have affected my decision to get a TTL flash at all if I'd known, since I didn't get it just for insects. They do affect how I use the 430EX II though, so if you're thinking about what flash to get for this kind of photography, consider this an FYI.

Spyder 3 Express with laptop + external monitor

mike@michaelhampson.com (Michael) — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 16:41:00 +0000

I'm using a Spyder 3 Express from Datacolor for my monitor calibration. I'll probably upgrade the software to Color Eyes when I have some more cash, but for right now the basic software that comes with the puck is good enough. I want accurate color, but I don't think anything I'm doing is that color critical, so "good enough" is good enough.

One problem I ran into was getting it to calibrate the right display. I have a Dell U2410 wide gamut monitor (awesome display, by the way), attached to a Vostro 1500 laptop. It's not my ideal workstation computer, but it works pretty well, so like better calibration software, upgrading it isn't my highest priority right now. But the Spyder 3 Express, with the bundled software, only wants to measure the primary display, which it wrongly believes to be the laptop screen instead of the external. No amount of fiddling with display properties would convince it otherwise, but I did figure out how to do it.

Go into Power Options, and change the setting for when the laptop's lid is shut from "Sleep" or whatever it is to "Do Nothing". Then close the laptop, and open the Spyder 3 software -- you only have one display now, so it picks the monitor. Easy as that.

Disruption

mike@michaelhampson.com (Michael) — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 18:09:00 +0000

blue bee
Originally uploaded by mehampson

I was struck this week with a deep philosophical question. When bad luck occurs, but is canceled out by an equal yet opposite stroke of good luck, how do you rate things overall? Bad, because of the bad luck to begin with? Or good, because as unlikely as a catastrophe is, a catastrophe followed by a miracle is even less so?

I'm kind of inclined to go with the latter. I lucked out. A couple days ago, I ordered a new hard drive for my laptop -- a 320GB 7200 rpm Western Digital to replace an old 120GB 5400 rpm Seagate. It was kind of an impulse buy, since I was getting frustrated with Lightroom and Photoshop being sluggish about loading files and previews, and short of replacing the whole system, there's nothing else left to upgrade. Plus, I haven't really trusted the old drive for a while now -- it's an three-year-old laptop -- so a $60 upgrade seemed like a good idea.

The new drive shipped out on Friday, and by Sunday morning, the old one in the laptop was dead. Totally dead. Not even recognized by the BIOS. Making whhrr--sproing noises. So I'd say that was pretty good timing, and pretty good luck, since I only wound up with two days downtime.

But like everything else, 95% of good luck is good planning. It wouldn't have mattered that I had a replacement in the mail at the moment my drive died if I didn't have everything important backed up. I had stopped keeping anything important on my laptop a few months ago: RAW files were imported directly to my external drive, which had a second copy of nearly all my "data". I keep my OS and applications on one partition, and all my photos, mp3s, documents, etc. on a separate one, to make reinstalls easier -- my external drive has a copy of that second partition. My photos also live on another external drive that I keep at my girlfriend's apartment, in case mine gets struck by a meteorite or something.

The real luck here was having the foresight to prepare for this kind of problem. Whether you're a photographer or not, if you don't have at least one backup solution, get one right now. I've lost some stuff, but nothing I can't recreate or find new copies of. The only hassle really is reinstalling Windows and the big programs I use every day, and that just took an afternoon or so. I don't want to think about where I'd be if I'd lost all my photos from the past few years...

---------------------

At the same time as all this, I broke my macro rig. I tried mounting the bracket to a tripod collar to see how well it worked, but the socket on the bracket just rotated in place when I tried to unscrew it. Eventually the whole thing cracked in half when I tried pulling it out. I haven't done much bug stuff lately, except for some natural light work I haven't been thrilled with. (Got some GREAT shots of chive flowers this way, though.)

But I finally got the replacement bracket in the mail, along with a third-party lens hood for the 100mm macro that I'll trim down to work with the extension tubes, and went out and shot the blue solitary bee in the photo above. Still need to do some tweaking to the overall rig, but I'm happy to have found a new bee.

Domke F-802 Review

mike@michaelhampson.com (Michael) — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 12:38:00 +0000

I love my Domke F-6, but as I've been expanding my kit and preparing to offer my services as a photographer, I've recognized that it's not going to be the best solution for bringing a large kit to a shoot. I don't think it would fit two bodies, a 70-200mm zoom and another medium-sized lens or two, plus lighting gear. Additionally, while I personally like the Ruggedwear finish, I wanted something a bit more business casual, so to speak. I'm still completely happy with my F-6 and wanted to stick with Domke, so I ended up getting the Domke F-802 Reporter's Satchel, a large satchel-style bag, in the normal Sand finish. (Because I'm carrying so much in this bag, I also picked up the Domke Shoulder Pad, which helps keep the weight from getting painful -- highly recommended, and you'll see it in the pictures, but it doesn't come with the bag.)

Domke calls the F-802 a "Reporter's Satchel", but it works quite well as a camera bag. Like all their F-series bags, it's made of a durable but flexible cotton canvas. I was tempted to get one of the J-series satchels, which are made of black ballistic nylon, but there's no J-802 that I can find, and I wanted the larger size more than the different material. I was also considering the F-811 or F-812, which are designed to carry a laptop and a DSLR system, but I couldn't find many reviews of them, and they're about twice as expensive -- I don't plan on needing to transport my laptop to shoots very often, so I ruled them out.

I also could have gotten an F-2, or even an F-1X, but I decided that I wanted a satchel instead of a duffel bag. For one thing, it's less conspicuous: the F-802 could be any large messenger bag. Living and working around Boston, carrying an obvious camera bag would also potentially make me look like a tourist or a student, and thieves are more likely to see them as a target. A satchel might suggest a laptop, but every bag's obviously going to carry something, and I think "maybe a laptop?" is a better risk than "definitely a camera". Not that the F-2 looks a lot like a camera bag, of course.

The slimmer profile of the satchels is also a draw. It keeps more of the gear closer to my body, so there's less a risk of carelessly smacking into something (or someone) because it's sticking out. It does make the F-802 harder to work out of, since the bag is deeper, but I suspect it's just a matter of getting used to a deep space instead of a broad one. On the other hand, I do a lot of shooting bending or even laying down, and I'd be worried about things falling out if it tipped over on the ground with the flap open -- something a duffel wouldn't do.

The bag is built really well. There are no loose threads anywhere, and all the materials are high quality. The strap runs down along the sides and is sewn to the bottom of the bag, so the weight is distributed over the entire bag, and not just on a few square inches at the top. It also has a rubber tread sewn into it, which keeps it secure on your shoulder. The top flap has a handle on it, made of the same thick cotton material as the strap, with a metal reinforcement underneath. I've actually heard of this support wearing through the bag after a few years, but I have no idea if the problem is widespread or not. The clip that secures the flap is very strong, and takes some work to open; I expect it'll ease up in time, but frankly I like that it's not going to pop open too easily.

On the outside, there's a large but thin pocket on the back, which I stick lens caps into while I'm shooting. There are also two zippered front pockets (heavy YKK zippers), large enough for business cards, small notepads, and other small-ish items you want easy access to.

Inside is a lot of storage space. There are two velcroed front pockets, each large enough to carry a Super Clamp and umbrella adapter. Or, though it's a little tight, a 40D with battery grip (and no lens, of course). The velcro patches on these pockets are very large, about the size of a business card, so it's easy to shut them securely. Also, the Domke logo is on the flap of one of these, meaning it's not visible when the main flap is closed -- another way the F-802 avoids standing out as a camera bag. (Though let's be honest: any thief who'd know Domke is a camera bag maker could probably recognize the F-802.)

There's a second thin pocket inside, which could hold a binder or large notepad; I keep some sample 4"x6" prints in here, and would use it for any shoot-related paperwork. Between this and the four pockets, you're probably going to have room for all the cables, filters, spare batteries and other miscellaneous accessories you need for whatever system you're carrying.

The main compartment is sized for a pretty good work system. Its dimension are 14.5"x12"x3", which doesn't account for the natural flex of the fabric. That's the big advantage of Domke bags: they expand or collapse around what they're carrying, so it keeps its balance and comfort whether its packed full or is half empty. The bottom and sides are lightly padded, just enough for the bag to keep its shape empty. It's not enough to protect the contents in case of a serious accident, but if you're getting a Domke, this shouldn't come as a surprise: they're flexible, fast bags that are easy to use, but ultimately you are its best protection from accidents.

One nice detail: the interior padding is olive green, and the unpadded surfaces are of the same material as the exterior (really, they are the exterior), so unless you have a black bag, it's easy to see exactly what's at the bottom of the bag.

Since the F-802 is marketed as a reporter's satchel, it doesn't include any inserts to keep the main compartment organized. I use the Domke FA-230 3 Compartment Insert. With this setup, I can carry the 40D with 70-200mm f/4L IS attached (hood reversed) in one compartment, the old EOS A2 (I haven't gotten a second digital body yet, but wanted to see how one will fit) with 17-40mm f/4L on the other end, and the 100mm f/2.8 Macro in the middle. The 100mm Macro is about as large as will fit between the two main lenses. There's still room on either end of the insert for a flash; I was able to fit the 430EX II and a Vivitar 285HV in, barely, but the Viv is much bulkier than most modern flashes. With these two bodies, three mid-sized lenses, and two flashes, I was still able to fit a 24' TTL cord from FlashZebra in the main compartment. I can also fit the cameras in with their grips attached, though it's a tight fit -- though the A2 is a film camera with a small vertical grip, not a bulkier motor drive or battery grip, and I don't know if a second one of those would fit.

The bodies, with or without grip, are pressed right next to each other like this. I took the side padding out of the FA-230, and will probably reuse it as a divider to keep them from rubbing. Everything else is secure. On that note, I can feel the contents of the bag against my side as I'm carrying it, and I'll probably add a bit of that padding between the insert and the back of the bag for comfort.

With all this gear packed, the main flap still shuts easily, since the clasp comes up between the front two cargo pockets. The sides of the compartment are completely covered, so I'm not worried about rain or snow getting in, like I was with the F-6. The canvas finish is probably less water-resistant than the Ruggedwear, but canvas is pretty good at keeping the contents dry, and there's multiple layers of it around the electronic stuff in the main compartment.

All in all, I'm as happy with the F-802 as I am with the F-6. I'm still using the F-6 when I'm out on a photo walk, especially doing macro work with bugs, where I don't need to carry my entire work kit with me. For carrying everything though, I'm very happy with the F-802. If in the future I ever have more gear than this bag can carry, I don't think I would be using a single bag for it.

By the way: Purchases made through the links provided here support this site and my photography. Please be sure that I stand by my recommendations, and only ever suggest items that I would spend my own money on.

Canon EF 17-40mm f/4L USM Review

mike@michaelhampson.com (Michael) — Fri, 14 May 2010 14:05:00 +0000

Making myself available as a photographer has meant investing in new gear. Some things I need to fill in certain gaps, like focal lengths that my 50mm and 100mm macro don't cover, and others to provide durability (or at least redundancy) that I don't currently have. It's expensive, but necessary, and as far as business start-up costs go, I think I have it pretty easy, since I don't need to worry about real estate or vehicles or anything scary-expensive like that.

The first big upgrade is the Canon EF 17-40mm f/4L USM, a wide-angle zoom. I decided to get this lens first for a couple of reasons: I don't have anything in that focal range, it's the cheapest of the lens/camera upgrades I want to make, and I can use it as a wide-standard zoom on my 40D (I think I have to put off an upgrade to the 5D II until last).

This is my first L lens, and it's pretty clearly in a different class than the other lenses I have. Rather than give the same review focusing on technical details that you can find everywhere else on the internet, I'd like to pass over the image quality and instead talk about my first experience using it on a crop body.

It feels solid in the hand, though it's not a massive lens. It balances very well with the 40D, and I imagine it would with the heavier bodies, too. The front element is huge -- it has a 77mm filter diameter while being only 97mm long -- and dark. You can see down into the body of my other lenses, this one has more of a "black box" appearance to it. I was surprised at the slight resistance and muffled click when I mounted it for the first time, until I realized that it was due to the rubber o-ring that seals the mount against water and dust.

The USM autofocus is very snappy, nearly silent, and from what I've seen so far, pretty accurate. The zoom ring and focus ring are both smooth and quiet, without the dry scratchy sound of inexpensive lenses. I will say that I've never had a zoom lens that doesn't change length while zooming, and that was a bit of a surprise, being one of the little details that had slipped my mind. It also keeps an f/4 aperture through the zoom range, as opposed to others that drop a full stop after zooming in by 1mm from wide open.

I was aware of something with this lens that I've never consciously felt before: that this is a piece of equipment that my imagery deserves, and on the flip side, it is not one that I can hide behind when a shot doesn't come out how I'd wanted. Don't get me wrong, I am NOT one to mistake quality gear for quality photography. But holding it in my hand for the first time, that was my gut response. It's definitely true, of course, but it's also true of my 100mm f/2.8 USM Macro, and probably even the 50mm f/1.8 II -- the difference is in the build quality and cosmetic design, and I have no doubt that this is exactly the impression Canon wants to give.

We had some reasonable weather the day after I got the lens, so I went out for a photowalk -- no flash, no bag, just the 17-40mm on the 40D. With the crop factor, it's acting as a 28-64mm zoom, which for me is a great focal length. It's funny that 95% of the time I've been shooting with a prime between 50mm and 100mm (both telephoto on the 40D), but I really connect with the wide/standard perspective. I like having that depth without necessarily going ultrawide.

As I said, I don't want to get too deep into the image quality side of it (this lens has been around for years and I doubt I could say anything original there) but I do think it's important to say that my initial impression, that this is a lens my images deserve, stands up once I was actually looking at the results. I would comfortable printing a 100% crop from this lens. Color is great, detail is great, contrast is great. This is a lens whose quality you can see by looking through the camera's viewfinder.

I think what I was really feeling when I pulled the lens out of its box was a sense of confidence: I can rely on this lens. It's a sense that I don't have to baby it. It's not fragile, it's not plastic, and I'm not worried that some delicate mechanism inside is about to snap if I swing it around too quickly. Obviously I'm going to be careful with it, but I don't have the nagging voice in the back of my mind that's monitoring how I'm handling it while I'm shooting. Having actually shot a bit with it, I still feel the same, and the images I'm getting from it back that up.

That's one less distraction, and to me it's the most important reason for getting pro-grade gear: if I'm going to book half my day (and possibly half of someone else's day too) to a shoot out on location, I need to have confidence that my gear won't let me down in any way. I also need to know that it's not going to spontaneously die the day after the warranty expires. That peace of mind is what you're really paying for with L glass.

Fake Landscapes: The Book

mike@michaelhampson.com (Michael) — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 20:30:00 +0000

I am thrilled to announce the release of Fake Landscapes, my first photo book. The book is a collection of macro images of fruits and vegetables, lit and shot to resemble strange terrains. No digital manipulation was used, only the very basic tweaks that any photo gets. Only lighting, perspective, and other in-camera trickery turn these potatos and avocados into scenes of various landscapes throughout the day.

Fake Landscapes is available for $35 (plus shipping) through AdoramaPix. This book looks great and feels great, and holding it my hands makes me really proud of the work inside. I wanted to publish these images in a format that I really felt they deserved, and really, they look awesome here. The pages are thick, with brilliant colors and sharp lines (the book is printed on Fuji Crystal Archive photo paper), the covers are sturdy, and the binding is strong.

You can browse through a low-resolution copy of the entire book through the ordering page, but here are a few sample images:

If these look interesting, please consider purchasing a copy -- it's a beautiful photo book, and you're supporting my work as an independent artist. And you can check out my work through my fake landscape gallery for larger viewing or prints.

Fake Landscapes: $35 plus shipping

Stepping It Up

mike@michaelhampson.com (Michael) — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 16:02:00 +0000

The past week or two have been pretty big for me, in some ways. Up until now, I've been working part time in a field I enjoy (providing animal husbandry for marine life), and treating photography as an occasionally income-generating hobby that I could take more seriously than I could if I were fully employed. At the end of last year, I was told that my job and several others were all being consolidated into a single full-time position, and that at some point soon I'd either be hired for that or be out of work.

Fast forward to April: I did not get that position. In the meantime, I haven't really found any other work to replace it with. This field is tiny. Jobs in it are rare and highly competitive even in a good economy, and I'd have to be open to moving just about anywhere -- which I'm not. Or I could find an office job, giving all my best efforts to an organization that, if I'm lucky, I kinda like (I've tried this in the past, with very mixed success).

So, I have a background working with animals, and as an interpretive naturalist. I know how to teach myself about the natural world and find what's most interesting or important about something to teach others. I have a good grasp of the technical and artistic fundamentals of photography and how to apply them to nature...

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that this is the best opportunity I'll have to turn photography into a fulfilling career. If taking a normal 9-to-5 job would mean sacrificing what I'm most passionate about and most interested in doing for the sake of a regular paycheck, then I honestly think it would be a mistake that I'd look back on and regret. Even worse, it would be cowardly. Or maybe not -- I'm not afraid of hard work, of failure, or of having to learn the marketing and business skills this will take. But I am afraid of spending my life doing work where my only real personal interest is a paycheck and a 401k.

I still have my part-time job going, though it's liable to dry up on short notice. It covers rent and bills, but not much else. Hopefully this will last long enough to get some revenue coming in, and for me to really fine-tune my strategy. I have a rough plan of what I want to do, and of the start-up costs it's going to take.

So that's my big news. If you're in the Boston area, have need of a photographer, and want to help me get in motion, get in touch (I'll write a post later describing what I offer in more detail). And stay tuned, because I'll be announcing my first photo book for sale in the next day or two :)

Plans for Summer 2010

mike@michaelhampson.com (Michael) — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 14:51:00 +0000

I have my macro rig nearly how I want it. I've got the 430EX II on a cheap straight bracket, with an off-camera TTL cord and a DIY diffuser. I've got a replacement TTL cord coming in the mail (the current one damaged my Vivitar, leading to the 430EX II), and as soon as that comes, I'll put up some pictures of the whole thing.

I've already been out shooting, and have been pretty happy with the results. There are plenty of miner bees out and about, and I already met one of my goals for the year: shooting a miner bee, or a sweat bee, at the entrance to her nest. I've seen one or two metallic sweat bees, several carpenter bees, and one cuckoo bee. Hopefully it'll really warm up soon and more will start coming out.

Shooting a miner bee in the nest was one goal. I have a few others, in terms of subject matter and productivity.

More bees in nests, on branches, mating and in other behaviors besides foraging.
There's a mid-sized bluish-black bee I've seen a few times, but never have gotten close to.
More wasps. There are tons of them around, and I don't have much to show of them.
Beetles, too.
I want to re-do my series of ants farming aphids from last summer. I feel like I got several great moments captured poorly.
I'd like to rent the 180mm Macro and shoot Karner blue butterflies in the Albany Pine Bush.
Same with a good wide-angle, for landscapes there.
Build up my collection of rights-managed nature stock on Alamy. I want to have at least 200 good images there by the end of the summer. I've gotten 26 accepted in the last two weeks, so I'm on a good track for that.
Put out a book of bee photos. I'd like to focus on my favorites, the green metallic halictids, but I haven't decided how specific I want to get. It would be a combination of images and text.

Lightroom keywords for taxa

mike@michaelhampson.com (Michael) — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 15:27:00 +0000

I hate keywording. I really do. I like post-processing in general but sitting down and coming up with all the possible ways someone might be searching for an image is tedious. Especially as a nature photographer, since there are so many different things about an animal that might be potentially interesting to someone.

Take the name of the animal, like this Andrena bee. Someone may need a photo to actually represent the genus Andrena. Or they might just be looking for any mining bee -- in that case, are they looking for the term "mining bee", or for the family Andrenidae? Or even the sub-family Andreninae? What if they're looking for any bee? Any hymenopteran? Any insect?

I hate having to put all those in, and honestly I often half-ass it and settle for "bee, andrena, insect". That's probably fine, especially if it's a photo I'm just putting up on Flickr, but I don't like leaving those other possibilities off the table just because I'm bored of typing in family and order names, and want to get to the next photo.

Lightroom has a way to automate this, through the creative use of nested keywords and synonyms. A keyword can contain other keywords: Let's say you have a tree that looks like this:

food
meat
plant
fruit
vegetable
grain
dairy

The benefit of building this structure is that when you export an image with a keyword nested inside another, Lightroom walks up the keyword tree and adds every root keyword it finds. So tagging a photo of an apple as "fruit" would also automatically tag it as "plant" and "food". The tree is one-way: tagging it as "plant" does not add "fruit", "vegetable", or "grain".

Synonyms are related to trees. Instead of an up-and-down structure, it's side-by-side. So you could add the synonyms "veggie" and "greens" to "vegetable", and they would all be added to any image tagged with "vegetable".

Essentially what I've started doing is to build a taxonomic tree of nested keywords, all starting under "animal". Inside "animal" is the keyword "arthropod", which contains "hexapod", and then "insect", and "Hymenoptera". I've started building a structure below this of all the kinds of bees I might conceivably find -- I've only got it flesh out to about the tribe level so far, and in some places not much below the family, but here's what the hymenopteran part of the tree looks like when I export it as a text file:

({brackets} show synonyms of the keyword they're inside, so "hymentopteran" is a synonym of "Hymenoptera".)

Hymenoptera
   hymenopteran}
   Aculeata
   bee
   {anthophila}
   {apidae}
   {apiformes}
   {apoidea}
   Andrenidae
   {andrenid bee}
   {solitary bee}
   {burrowing bee}
   {ground-nesting bee}
   {miner bee}
   {mining bee}
   Andreninae
   Andrena
   Apidae
   Apinae
   Anthrophorini
   {anthrophorine bee}
   Apini
   {honey bee}
   Apis
   Apis mellifera
   Bombini
   {bumble bee}
   Centridini
   Emphorini
   Eucerini
   {long-horned bee}
   Euglossini
   {orchid bee}
   Exomalopsini
   Melectini
   Nomadinae
   {cuckoo bee}
   Xylocopinae
   {carpenter bee}
   Ceratina
   {small carpenter bee}
   Calloceratina
   Calloceratina cobaltina
   Ceratinula
   Ceratinula arizonensis
   Ceratinula cockerelli
   Zadontomerus
   Zadontomerus calcarata
   Zadontomerus dupla
   Zadontomerus strenua
   Xylocopa
   Xylocopa virginica
   {Eastern carpenter bee}
   Halictidae
   {halictid}
   {halictid bee}
   {sweat bee}
   Halictinae
   Augochlorini
   Augochlora
   Augochlorella
   Augochloropsis
   Halictini
   Agapostemon
   {green metallic bee}
   {green sweat bee}
   {green}
   {metallic}
   Agapostemon virescens
   Halictus
   Lasioglossum
   Mexalictus
   Sphecodes

For myself, I've chosen to use Latin names as the base keywords, with common names and outdated scientific names as synonyms. Where a common name can apply to more than one species, I put it as high up on the tree as I can. In some cases, like for Agapostemon (a bright green bee with a reflective thorax), I added certain adjectives that will be relevant to any photo I ever take of one as synonyms.

So, I tag the image above as "Andrena". When I export it, Lightroom automatically adds all the root keywords and synonyms it finds. It ends up tagged as "Aculeata; Andrena; Andrenidae; Andreninae; Hexapoda; Hymenoptera; andrenid bee; animal; anthophila; apidae; apiformes; apoidea; arthropod; bee; burrowing bee; groundnesting bee; hexapod; hymenopteran; insect; miner bee; solitary bee;" -- all from one single tag.

I'm also fleshing out structures for other groups of animals that I frequently shoot, and will do the same for behaviors later. All my spiders are auto-tagged "predator" now, for example. It's an up-front investment in time, but great for days like today, where it's raining and I'm waiting on FedEx to bring me my replacement flash. And I'll be perfectly honest: I love automating repetitive tasks, I love taxonomy and phylogeny, and I love directional trees (graph theory is my favorite kind of math). It's a total confluence of geekery, that, for once, is actually somewhat productive.

Broken pictures

mike@michaelhampson.com (Michael) — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 13:12:00 +0000

Many many many of the photos in my blog posts will be dead links for a little bit. I'm reorganizing my galleries into a more logical, easy to browse structure. For example, instead of one gallery of ALL bees and wasps, I'm just going to have a sub-gallery for all the hymenoptera, and then different galleries for each different type. But it means breaking the links to almost everything I move around, so apologies for that.

Macro bracket, part 5 : flash resolved

mike@michaelhampson.com (Michael) — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 19:20:00 +0000

As I mentioned before, I wasn't sure if I was going to keep on using a Vivitar 285HV as my light source or not. I wanted to upgrade to a TTL flash for better consistency and rear-curtain sync, but funds are limited. A couple things have led me to order a 430EX II this morning, though.

First, I found that the guide numbers of the Yongnuo flash I was considering was understated by about a stop. This isn't really a big deal to me, except for the fact that it meant I'd have to use a higher power setting than I really want to, which means a longer flash pulse. When I considered that along with the uneven build quality, lack of a real warranty, and the other minor uncertainties that come with buying a third-party flash, I decided that I wasn't confident in putting my money there. All the little uncertainties add up to too much of a risk -- the YN-465 is about $15-$20 out of my comfort zone. (I will definitely say that the YN-460 II is not, and if I were looking for a manual flash right now, it'd be at the top of my list.)

The other thing is that I've noticed the foot of my Vivitar is starting to crack apart. My off-camera cord has a slightly wobbly hotshoe, and the back-and-forth movement has put enough torque on the foot to start peeling away one of the flanges. I've shimmed the hotshoe so it won't move anymore, but now the flash moves on its own. It'll be fine as a remote flash, laying on its side with a receiver on the foot, but I don't trust it mounted to anything where the cracked flange has to support its weight.

So, I bit the bullet and ordered the 430EX II from Beach Camera's eBay store, which had the lowest price of any Canon authorized dealers after cashback. I wish I'd noticed the damage to the Vivitar last week, when there was a $15 rebate, but what can you do...

I considered replacing the off-camera cord, which is the old "Canon Off Camera Shoe Cord 2" that was replaced by the OC-E3, but I think I've fixed the wobble (kind of a rotating looseness in the metal part of the hotshoe) by shimming it with thick paper.

Once the new flash arrives, I'll make a diffuser that fits on it in the same style as the one I made for the Vivitar, and I think I'll have my bracket finished. I'll post photos explaining everything then. In the meantime, I'll finish going through all the photos I took last week while I was visiting family in upstate New York. I've already uploaded a whole gallery of sawfly photos, which I'm quite happy with -- my first real macros at a magnification higher than 1:1. More very soon, I hope.

Designing a Macro Bracket, pt.4

mike@michaelhampson.com (Michael) — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 17:41:00 +0000

Continued from Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3

I still have a few minor things to overcome with the bracket -- the raised post on the end comes off, but the screw is too long to mount anything to without it. I'm considering a few possible ways to work around this, but I've spent a lot of time talking about the bracket, and I'd like to move on. I'll definitely mention what I've got when I have a final solution.

So, the next phase is lighting. This is the whole point of the macro rig: dump enough light on the subject to get a good exposure, and dump it in an aesthetically appealing way. There are over-the-counter macro lighting solutions that work quite well, some of them better than what I'm making here. The MT-14EX ring light and MT-24EX twin light are quite good, but they're really, really expensive. I love macro photography, and as long as there's something to shoot at 1:1 my 100mm macro lens doesn't really come off the camera, but I can't justify spending hundreds of dollars on something I can only use for macro. So I use traditional flash units, which are less expensive and very versatile.

I already have a Vivitar 285HV, a cheap and popular manual-only flash. I'm considering upgrading it, if budget allows, but that's not certain yet. The ideal flash for this rig is lightweight, for obvious reasons, with enough power to get a fast flash pulse, and has TTL metering. A flash will give you hard, ugly light, so it also needs a diffuser of some kind.

The flash pulse is important for freezing motion: I shoot a lot of bugs, which are very active and very fast. Basically the lighting scenario I'm in most often is one where I'm shooting with a shutter speed close to my camera's fastest sync speed, or around 1/250, with an aperture of at least f/8, and usually f/11 to f/14, on an ISO of 100 to 200; the flash fires at 1/16th power, because it's so close to the subject. Without a flash, these settings would give you an unexposed black frame, except on the brightest of days.

So imagine, in slow-motion, what happens as you press the shutter with these settings: For a long 1/250th of a second, almost no light is falling on the sensor. Then, the flash fires a burst of light, and for the 1/16,000th of a second that it's pulsing, light floods into the camera and the sensor records that image, which by itself is a full exposure. The flash turns off, and the sensor is no longer receiving any light. At the end of that 1/250th of a second, the shutter closes, and the sensor sends its data -- all of it recorded in that 1/16,000th of a second -- to the camera's image processor.

The pulse duration of a powerful flash on a low setting is going to be much better at freezing motion than the fastest shutter speed your camera can do. Unfortunately, Canon doesn't release its speedlites' flash pulse duration, and even for the third-party companies that do, there are different ways of measuring it. So there's a bit of guesswork here; I think the only real thing we can do is assume that any moderately powerful flash is going to be fast enough, and choose between them on other grounds. It probably rules out small low-power flashes, and it definitely rules out constant light sources like LED lamps.

TTL isn't critical, and I don't feel like I need it at all for my non-macro stuff. It would be nice so I don't have to adjust the power level if I'm shooting a little further back, or decide to use a circular polarizer, for example. E-TTL 2 can make finer adjustments than just the one-stop power levels of the Vivitar 285HV. It also offers rear-curtain sync -- that would let me slow the shutter speed down to let more ambient in, and capture motion trails to show movement. These are generally convenience things, but I'd like to have them.

Two things I don't care about: Electronic zoom heads are a complete non-factor for me. High-speed sync is actually something I want to avoid using. It sounds like a great idea, using ambient as the main light, and high-speed sync as fill, but the way it works is to use thousands of low-power pulses through the entire exposure; when the subject is a fast-moving insect, that'll give a blurred picture -- like a strobe effect, but probably too close together to look cool.

Considering these things, I'd like to upgrade to the 430EX II if I can afford it. I go back and forth on the Yongnuo YN-465 and YN-467; I'd like to see a comparison to an official Canon flash in terms of build quality and reliability. Considering they cost less than half as much as the 430EX II, I'm willing to cut them a little slack, but I want good odds of getting more than a single season out of them before I drop money on one. Really it's the international shipping that gets me: if there were a supplier in the US who would handle replacements under warranty, I'd be much more likely to buy one. This all depends on my job situation, too, which is either seriously improving or completely disappearing in the next few weeks, and I don't have any idea which yet. No new toys if I'm unemployed. Fortunately for me, the flash I have works fine -- this is an entirely optional upgrade for me. (I wouldn't get the Vivitar as a macro flash if I were doing it again, though: it's too heavy, it has a beveled head that's hard to mount things on, and it's expensive compared to more modern competitors. On a super-tight budget, I'd go with the manual YN-460 or YN-460 II as a first flash, or on one of the E-TTL flashes I mentioned above.)

As for the diffuser, that's important for controlling the quality of the light. If you're already familiar with Strobist-style lighting, you know this already, and it's true for macro as well. The diffuser -- basically a small softbox -- is important because it makes the light bigger. The greater the angular size of the light source, the softer the shadows it makes. It also 'spreads out' the intensity of the lighting, so you can capture more detail in reflective surfaces without getting blown-out highlights. The plastic caps, like the Gary Fong-type diffusers, are no good here. They're designed for indoor use, and send light out in every direction to bounce back onto the subject. Outside, with nothing to bounce light off of at macro scales, they're just sending perfectly good light off into the void.

Right now I'm using the DIY flash diffusers described here on Myrmecos, albeit using a larger yogurt cup for my larger flash. It may be a bit too large, so I might remake it soon to be a bit shorter, but I'm getting great light from it. I'm using translucent vellum paper ($0.25 per sheet at my local stationary store) as the diffusion material, though Roscoe makes some professional materials for this exact purpose. That would be more durable, and more heat resistant as well -- though the general idea is to get the diffusion surface far enough away from the flash head to catch light from a wide area, so I'm not too concerned about the heat.

Spring flowers

mike@michaelhampson.com (Michael) — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 18:44:00 +0000

The appearance of small plants and flowers in the past two weeks has been a huge relief. I'm not much of an indoor photographer, and with the change of weather I've finally been able to get outside again. I've gotten a few good ant shots already, but with my macro rig in a transitional state (to put it nicely) I've been changing things up by shooting some flowers in natural light. I uploaded several to my gallery this morning.

Prints of all these images are available through the links.

Designing a Macro Bracket, pt. 3

mike@michaelhampson.com (Michael) — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 23:58:00 +0000

Continued from Part 1 and Part 2

In my previous post, I mentioned that I was considering using a cheap straight flash bracket in my macro rig this year, instead of something like the thick stainless steel plates I've been using. I ended up ordering this aftermarket Metz flash bracket, and received it this afternoon.

I'm glad I did. The bracket was $7 shipped, so it's technically a few times as expensive as the steel plates, but it's also a few times as effective. The screws are thumbscrews, so I don't need a screwdriver to secure or remove any part of the rig. The surface is non-slip, so I can use it in portrait orientation with the flash slipping down. The length is adjustable, which is great. I'm convinced that to get these qualities from a purely DIY solution would end up costing much more than $7 in tools, even if I'd be saving in materials.

My mini-ballhead won't fit on the flash end of the bracket (there's a raised bit that I assume has some function for Metz flashes), so I've got that end of my off-camera cord screwed onto it. Honestly, I'm also reconsidering how wise the ballhead is in the first place: the adjustability is nice, but the increased height leaves a lot of deep shadows puddled under most subjects. Having the flash a little lower will probably be okay, and the hotshoe can still rotate a bit without coming loose when I'm shooting at a longer working distance.

Playing with the bracket, I've found that it's long enough to put it on the right side of the camera and still leave room for my hand. This improves the balance quite a bit, since I'm basically holding onto the center of gravity, and it lets me get to the lens more easily if I need to adjust the focus distance. I can also use the vertical buttons on the camera grip this way to shoot in portrait.

So this solves a number of problems, even though it means changing some of my original concept. That's fine, since I'll end up with a better macro rig this year for it.

The last question I have to address is the flash itself, and proper diffusion. That's the most expensive part of the rig that I have to think about this year, and it'll depend on some work stuff that should be getting sorted out in the next week or so. If all goes well, I'd like to upgrade to a TTL flash. More on this in the next post.

Designing a Macro Bracket, pt.2

mike@michaelhampson.com (Michael) — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 20:29:00 +0000

Continued from Part 1

I'm sort-of coming to the conclusion that it's not worth making the plate myself. There are several straight brackets, some with cold shoes (or even hot shoes, with a PC terminal) for under $10 on Amazon and eBay. I feel like they'd be a lot more secure than the pre-drilled metal braces I've been using, and lighter, for only a few dollars more. I'm still looking for a good inflexible plastic plate, though.

I'm looking at brackets like this: a cheap Opteka and this Nikon. They're designed for a compact camera to use as a plate. I'm guessing that this is the sort of thing I'll be able to get for cheap on eBay, from a Fotodiox or one of the Hong Kong distributors.

Having a shoe on a store-bought bracket is actually not a selling point for me. I don't want the flash to be fixed in one spot, and I've been using a mini-ballhead, with the flash mounted on a short TTL coil cord. I'd like to keep using that, although I don't have a TTL flash. For one thing, it's very adjustable. For another, the connection is much more secure than a PC sync cord, which slips out of the camera's terminal very easily. I'm also hoping to move up to a TTL flash this summer, but I'll post on that separately.