Baron von Oracle

Diamond formation (click on this one, it’s pretty neat)

Solo flight

Number six

If you’re paying attention, you’ll notice that the first three photos (at 300mm) aren’t quite as sharp as the fourth one (at 96mm). The Tamron 70-300mm lens is really cheap, a fantastic bargain for the price, but it noticeably loses sharpness at the far end. Thing is, that’s where I want to use it, especially for stuff like this. It’s bad form to blame equipment, but in this case I actually did outshoot my lens. Looks like it’s time for an upgrade.

There’s something both ridiculous and amazing about watching six hundred pilots simultaneously fill up their contraptions and take to the sky in droves.

Most of the pilots launch right at dawn, but there is a small set that go up earlier to test the winds and make sure it’s safe enough for everyone else. I woke up at 4am to get to the field on time to photograph them as they set up and launched. I even bought a new lens specifically for the occasion, a Canon 10-22mm ultrawide, and used the tripod Annie gave me before I left. Be sure to click on each of the crops to view the full images. I’ll post the daylight images later, but for now enjoy the early bird set.

Turbine
Sikorsky
Not the starship
Dragonflies
Sunset Reflecting Pool

If you can identify any of these species, please do so. Unfortunately, there are about 175,000 known species of butterflies and moths, so if you have a field guide you might be looking for a while.

Someone had set their blue jacket down, and this guy landed on it. Because the upper part of its wings are bright blue, these butterflies are attracted to bright blue objects (it’s a mating adaptation). I first thought this was a Ulysses, but the underside wing markings don’t match. Update: This is a Morpho peleides. Thanks Heather!

Unknown species

Unknown species

Quite a few of the butterflies had tattered wings, showing just how fragile they really are. I was told this is a Postman butterfly, named because in the wild it travels the same route between flowers every day.
Probably Heliconius erato but might be Heliconius melpomene

Heliconius charitonius

Heliconius hecale? (Tiger Longwing?)

Unknown species

Papillio anchisiades?

I popped my el-cheapo 70-300mm Tamron on, and went to town. About halfway through I remembered the thing had a macro mode, so I grabbed a couple quick shots of some flowers as well. I’m quite happy with the results.

Plenty of solitary honeybees buzzed around collecting pollen, and I was able to snap off a few photos. One of the nicer things about solitary bees is that they avoid stinging people unless trapped or threatened, so you can get quite close. I snapped the switch on my lens into macro and got to it.

The red ball attached to this bee’s rear leg is a pollen basket:

Around the time we got to the hummingbird exhibit, Heather wanted to try out the Tamron, so I gave her that and put the 60mm macro on.

This little guy parked himself on a branch in the hummingbird exhibit. I waited while others got their shots, and he kept flying out to the feeder and back to the same spot. I started about 3 feet away, set the camera to continuous drive, and kept moving closer. When I finally stopped (because I had fewer than 30 shots left on my card) I was literally inches away, well within macro range. I’d taken 200 photos just of this one bird.

Apparently the 60 macro is a pretty good general-purpose lens too. Who knew.

Unfortunately it’s tough to explain to someone who has never been there just how vast the canyon is. Even pictures don’t really do it justice. I took a few pictures with the widest lens I have, the stock 18-55mm, but none of them turned out well (too much barrel distortion). So you’ll just have to use your imagination. These are some of the more interesting vignettes.

On the way back through the east exit, we drove by a scenic outlook of one of the tributaries, called the Little Colorado. Sunset was approaching and we got out to take some last-minute photos.

When I first bought the lens I tried taking photos of my girlfriend’s mechanical watch. The front face is clear so you can see the inner workings. Unfortunately I didn’t really know what I was doing and the results were less than stellar:

It wasn’t until last week that I was able to read up on what I was doing wrong and why nothing seemed to be in focus. A hint to aspiring macro photographers: stop down the aperture very small (f/6 is about as open as you want to go, but closer to f/11 would be better), and jack up the sensitivity of your camera. Get the focus in the neighborhood and then leave the ring alone and focus by physically moving the camera forward and backward.

Around that same time I started looking at small objects again, trying to find subjects. Luckily my landlord is a bit of a collector of random items. He’d found a rock around Winkelman and kept it because it had an interesting texture. The rock fell off a shelf outside and split in half on the ground, and he put the pieces back without really looking at it closely. A closer inspection revealed that this was no ordinary rock.

Warning: the blown up image below is large (3.5MB). Most browsers will load the entire image, then zoom to fit it on the screen; clicking somewhere within the image will usually make it full size. Then use the scroll bars to view it. For scale, the feature shown in the crop is approximately 5mm long.

These are fossils of a type of sea-dwelling animal called a Crinoid that was quite common in the Paleozoic Era, approximately 250 million years ago. (At least, that’s what I think the fossils are.) At the time, most of North America was a large inland sea next to a supercontinent. A majority of the limestone found in the United States is composed of the compressed skeletons and shells of the invertebrates that lived in that sea, accumulated in silt floods over millions of years.

I’d gotten out early from school the day I took this photo, and I wandered around the front yard looking for more small things to photograph. Several honeybees seemed to be very interested in a neighbor’s flowers, so I tried to find one at eye level that was staying still. They didn’t cooperate. In one shot which was unfortunately out of focus, I actually caught the bee as it took flight. Still, you can see the hairs on this one’s leg:

Perhaps the coolest thing about a macro lens is how it forces you to look for really small details. I wanted to take a picture of the tiny green fruits on this tree, which were about half the width of my index finger in diameter, and I saw a little speck on one. So I zoomed in and took a look:

Yep, those are aphids. On a tree branch that was wiggling back and forth in the wind like a windshield wiper. I just set the camera to continuous drive and held down the shutter. Only about 3 of the 30 I took were even remotely in focus, and this one is a crop of an otherwise out of frame shot. I still like it.

Because some of you keep asking, the woman in the first shot is a barista who works at the shop.