Thursday 18 September 2008

Need a good ID book(s) for diptera

In the morning it was a bit misty, which meant that the spiders' webs in the back garden were a bit dewey, so I tried taking some photos of them. I used the MP-E65 with the MT-24EX without diffusers since the diffusers stick out too much so you can't get as close to the web (and so can't shoot at as high magnification, which I needed to as the dew drops were only small). I found the results weren't as good as last time I shot dewey spiders webs, when I did have diffusers on the MT-24EX. The problem is the undiffused flash heads reflections look uglier in the dew drops than the diffused flash heads reflections.

I also tried some with a background behind them, and in the dew drops you can see the background, of course you have to zoom in to like 100% to see the bg in the drops, so not really a problem. Sometime I need to try the trick of getting smiley faces or sumat similar as a bg for dew drops so the face fills the drops.

I also found a waterlily leaf beetle with dew drops on it, the first time I've actually seen an insect in real-life with dew drops on. There were some downy feathers in the grass covered in dew drops, so I took some photos of those, I thought they looked really good through the viewfinder at 3x, the little water drops like loads of crystals.

Then I tried taking photos of some dew drops on the variegated grass leaves, after taking a few shots I thought it might look good backlit, so I took the MT-24EX flashes off the 450d and held them under the leaf, unfortunately the cords from the flash controller to the flash heads on the MT-24 are quite short, and I couldn't get the flash heads far away enough to not blow out the leaf.

So I went inside and got my Wimberley macro flash bracket and Nikon SB-800 flash unit, and after quite a while of fiddling (and getting granny breakfast) I went back in the garden to try and get some backlit pics with the SB800 being in remote (SU800) mode and triggered by the MT-24EX on the MP-E.Unfortunately it had taken so long for me to put the setup together that most of the dew drops had dried up. I did find a bit of leaf with dew drops still on it, but all the pics were OOF/blury. I'm not sure if this is due to me being rubbish, or if the time delay between the MT-24EX firing and the SB-800 firing is long enough so the subject is no longer in focus (as the setup is constantly moving about since I shot it handheld).

After that I took some photos of leaves of other plants with the setup, and I thought they came out quite nicely.

I spent the rest of the morning and part of the afternoon sorting/processing the pics.

The rest of the afternoon I checked wildaboutbritain.co.uk and had got some IDs, so updated them and also spent quite a while researching ID guides for British flies, especially Chloropidae, but didn't have much luck. I did find a couple guides (none for Chloropidae or Anthomyiidae) though, which I added to my amazon watchlist, but they were very old (and so probably out of date) and expensive.

In the evening I added some more pics to wildaboutbritain for ID and also checked my email/hotukdeals/dpreview/deviantart/redbubble. Watched Battlestar Trashlactica with Mac as well.

Food
Breakfast: Blackberry jam toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Lunch: 2x cheese on toast; banana; breakaway; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Pasta with tomato sauce and bacon bits. Pudding was a creamy yoghurt. Coffee; Roses.

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