Owls in the Melaleuca tree

These owls were in the melaleuca tree in my parents' front yard a few nights ago. My mother held a flashlight on them while I took some photos. To capture them, I put my camera on a tripod and I used a 75-300 mm telephoto lens, and I used relatively long exposures, (this one was 1/4 of a second), and I turned up the ISO setting to 6400. The ISO setting is basically how sensitive to light the sensor is, and 6400 is really sensitive, so you can expose the sensor to light for just a very short amount of time, and hopefully get a good photo. However, these high settings can cause grainy photos.

Canon doesn't let you use the ISO 6400 setting right out of the box if you get my camera, a T1i, I think because they felt it was too grainy. The T2i and T3i have better performance at this setting, and so the manufacturer feels the 6400 and 12800 settings aren't up to their standards on the T1i. So you have to go through some custom settings menus to even find these settings with my camera.

Fortunately it wasn't windy, if it had been then the long exposure method wouldn't have worked. I considered using the flash, but decided not to, as I thought the camera was too far from the owls for the flash to make a difference. I was probably wrong about this. With the high ISO setting, I could have got the owls exposed something like the way I got the tree in this photo using the flash. I took this photo about three hours after the first owl photos, because the owls were making a barking sound. I could not find them anymore, only hear them.

Butterflies and more

Today it seemed like a thunderstorm was coming. It didn't rain, but there was a lot of rumbling. I think it's harder for insects and birds to fly when there's a storm coming, due to the reduced air pressure, so they tend to not waste their energy if they can. I got some great photos of butterflies sitting around.

A white peacock butterfly (Anartia jatrophae) rests in a Lantana bush.

Another white peacock, on the leaf of a hurricane flower plant(Billbergia pyramidalis). Notice the four legs. Your fourth-grade science teacher lied to you when she told you insects all have six legs. Many butterflies do have six legs, but for the Nymphalidae, the front pair of legs remains undeveloped. These butterflies have six legs in much the same sense that humans have a tail.

There are some wild grape vines in the backyard, and sometimes flies, like this one, cling to the dead vines. Up close, their metallic bodies cause them to hardly look alive, more like some robot that someone made.

An ant looks for food on a rubber tree fruit.

A Cassius Blue butterfly (Leptotes cassius). These tiny, hairy butterflies are about the size of a fingernail. If you click the image, to see it in higher resolution, you can make out individual scales in its hindwing eyespot. Those fragile scales give butterflies their interesting coloration.

Here we see a long-tailed skipper, Urbanus proteus, taking nectar from a Lantana flower. These butterflies were abundant today in the backyard.

Life on a Lantana bush

A couple of months ago I found a nice 105mm Sigma macro lens at a pawn shop. It's great for taking photos of bugs and small things like that, especially using its very smooth manual focus. Here are some photos I took today using that lens on my T1i, which I supported with a monopod.

I edited them a bit (crop and resize, mostly) in Irfanview and Photoshop.

This butterfly was drinking nectar from Lantana flowers before a thunderstorm.

If you view this image at full resolution, you can actually see some mites on the butterfly's proboscis.

This snail was taking advantage of the damp conditions after the rain.

On a different Lantana bush after the thunderstorm, I found several mosquitoes. Some of them bit me, while others were more interested in immature Lantana flowers. 

First Post

Welcome to my blog! I plan on using this blog as a place to distribute my photos. Most of them are taken with a Canon EOS Rebel T1i, which I've had for about a year now.