Heather originally wanted to spend all her time at the Grand Canyon, but since she’s interested in all sorts of snakes, lizards, amphibians, insects, arachnids, and other things that crawl and slither, I insisted that she visit the Desert Museum in Tucson. I hadn’t been since before I left for Japan to study abroad, and the museum has undergone many changes since then. The most noticeable difference is how many of the enclosures have switched from using walls to using wire fences. It opens the area up and makes it look more like the real desert. The museum also features a new hummingbird exhibit, a honeybee display, and some more hands-on presentations dealing with fossils and the local strata. There are plenty of large animal exhibits, and of course the entire area is a xeriscape garden.

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.

My friend Heather came to visit from Pennsylvania last weekend, and I’d promised her we could go up to the Grand Canyon since she’d never seen it. We had planned on couch surfing with some strangers in Flagstaff for a few nights, but they backed out at the last minute. My uncle Kevin pulled through and gave us both a place to crash, and we were able to spend a full day at the GC. Thanks again!

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.

I bought a Canon 60mm f/2.8 Macro lens back in October. With school projects and a paper breathing down my neck I haven’t had that much time to play with it. The few pictures I took initially didn’t come out very well because I was trying to shoot at wide open apertures. This doesn’t work close up, because the depth of field at f/2.8 is tiny: at 1:1 magnification your margin of error is about 400 micrometers in each direction before getting unacceptably fuzzy. Even shooting stopped down to the neighborhood of f/5.6 only doubles that margin to almost a millimeter. But if you have really steady hands (or a tripod), a stationary subject, and a lot of patience, you can capture a very unique perspective.

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.

This is the last of the photos from that morning. The first two are from the coffee shop, and the last one was a large piece of glass from a sculpture in front of one of the university buildings. Sorry about the larger image size; I was trying to show a friend of mine how clear the 85mm f/1.8 is.

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

Here are some flowers from that other morning. Enjoy.

This is a continuation of the last post. All these photos were taken during the sleepless Friday morning.

I didn’t just take photos of dogs. Not like I could have even planned that. I took pictures of whatever caught my eye. Rooftops, cracks in the sidewalk, plants, cyclists.

I should mention something about the third image, which is a response to the arrest of a graduate student protester who drew chalk outlines on university sidewalks in protest of the casualties of the recent budget cuts. Apparently someone in the admin building didn’t like what he was doing, and he was booked for criminal damage, to the tune of $3000 in cleanup costs. Anyone sane will tell you that chalk washes off with a hose or the next rainfall, and it raised such a stink that the university president ordered the charges to be dropped. Even though this happened over a month ago you can still see this slogan written on walls and sidewalks in public places.

The image compression doesn’t do the lens justice. The pictures from this 85mm really are sharp as a razor.

Early this morning I was bitten by a mosquito at 6:30am and woke with a sharp smack. Unlike Dexter, I’m not really a morning person. But I was wide awake, the sun was rising, and I had a camera with a full battery. So I took a walk, first down the block, then to the end of the road, and then through campus and to my favorite coffee shop. The next couple posts have photos from that little excursion.

Along the way, I encountered no less than eight dogs. Morning seems to be a popular time for pooches. Dogs often make great photo subjects, when their owners aren’t hauling them away at a brisk pace. (Most canines are happy to stop and sniff, but if the owner keeps moving, then that’s that.)

I’ll let these photos speak for themselves, in a slightly different format than usual. Click on the crops for the full image.