My favorite for this week was earlier today. It really gave me a start! I was walking along the greenways when I sudenly came upon two eastern copperheads.
This is the larger of the two. The strange thing is that this was maybe 20-30 feet from a parking lot where a huge tailgate party was going on (it’s ECU Game Day). My thought is that the noise of all those people bothered the snakes, and they were crossing the greenway trying to get away.
In one sense it isn’t a lifer because I have encountered copperheads before. But these are by far the biggest I have ever seen, and the first ones I was able to photograph, so it is a lifer in the iNat sense.
My favorite lifer this week is this little… winged friend? This is where my lack of education really hinders me. All I know is this amigo is new and he/she/it is WILD looking. Also a very good model, quite calm, lots of exciting poses, 5 stars.
This Elephant Mosquito was spotted, almost accidentally – while I was on a short gear testing trek in my local walk-down-the-street park. It’s also just the fourth sighting of Toxorhynchites rutilus in Ontario (Canada) and fifth in the country.
My gear test? In spring I spotted a 15-year-old Canon Coolpix (P90) at a thrift shop for $40. A couple of new batteries and a mem chip later… I had epoxied a filter ring to the end of the lens so that I could clip in my already on hand, Raynox-250. And it was only this week that I got around to figure out how to get what I could out of this cheapo macro system enough to try some testing.
You know how this goes, right? You leave your ‘good’ camera at home and sorta laugh at thinking you’ll find anything really interesting on just a short test run. Well…
The thing is, it only saves to JPGs, so I had to figure out how to milk that for better dynamic tone, and also – this was just the built-in flash of the camera (no-diffusing) and so I was doing manual shutter/aperture testings as I went.
But, it does prove that you can get pretty good stuff without breaking the bank. Sometimes.
I spotted an elephant mosquito in front of my house about a month ago, but your pictures are on a whole other level! I really have to invest in a real camera one of these days.
Two weeks ago, I went to Isla Contoy again, a very interesting island at the Northeastern Yucatan peninsula. Nearby, there’s a very well-preserved coral reef. There I saw my first Comb jellyfish (phyllum Ctenophora)!!! And I saw like two or three!!! This find is particularly exciting to me, since my perception of them has always been like they are deep sea, bizarre creatures (influenced by Blue Planet for sure), and I saw them less than two meters deep! They were transparent with some green luminescence on their combs.
I also saw my first Rainbow Parrotfishes (Scarus guacamaia) They are so cool!
Oh! And I was forgetting about my first Glassy Sweepers (Pempheris schomburgkii), a cool looking nocturnal reef fish.
I have a trick for on-the-cheap diffusing for built-in flashes: plain ol’ translucent tape. You know the kind; frosted, the standard for desk dispensers and giftwrapping. You can even play tricks with it to get the kind of lighting that you want. I like to do a a single layer that leaves a 1 to 2mm uncovered border, then a second, much smaller layer over the hot point. Instant, DIY ring flash! The tape doesn’t interfere with closing or opening the mechanism, either.
Yep. Thrift store macro works. What you won’t probably find is the Raynox-250 macro clip lens. But I found a used one in my neighbourhood for 30 dollars.
If you do try the thrift (or used online) camera, look for a model that gives you high zoom mag telephoto. The higher that mag number, the smaller you will get with the Raynox.
The other nice thing about a clip on macro converter? You can use it even on dedicated macro lenses for the extra boost you sometimes wish you had. And with a superzoom bridge cam, you can do birds and bugs all in one small package. I use my Nikon P950 with a macro all the time.
A new moth for me and another possible new state record in New Mexico (found in neighboring Utah and Colorado previously). This and a few others carried me above 450 moth species on my yard list.
I was doing some observing with my microscope this week that yielded me a new lifer: this (relatively) massive Stentor Coeruleus found in a Sample from the Saint Lawrence river.
and I also saw a very striking Dorantes Longtail (Thorybes dorantes) which is not a new species to me (and right now they are everywhere) however I have never seen one whose wings have a rainbow sheen topside. (It is hard to see but it was also quite skittish, apologies.) It felt like a quite special thing to spot.
