The Spiny Orb-Weaver

I've always called these crab spiders, but apparently there is a different group of spiders that have been given that name. These spiders, called spiny orb-weavers, are common around here but they often don't photograph well for me. Their scientific name is Gasteracantha cancriformis. Appropriately, the specific epithet, cancriformis, means crab-shaped.

For this photo, I used my macro lens with manual focus and aperture priority. I turned up the F-stop to f/14 to get a good depth of field, so the whole spider would be in focus, and then I used ISO 1600, because at f/14 not much light gets into the camera so I needed it to be sensitive. The camera chose a shutter speed of 1/50 of a second, which is good because any slower and I risked a blurry photo because I wasn't using a tripod.

Dragonflies in Palm City

I took these photos in August in Palm City. There were dozens of these small dragonflies flying around, it must have been their mating season. I was using my macro lens with manual focus and no flash, as it was a very bright sunny day, and I used mostly automatic settings in P mode. I might have gotten better photos of dragonflies in flight if I had turned up the f number, and used a high ISO setting to compensate for the smaller aperture.

Sandpipers at the Indian River

Sandpipers are a common sight at beaches around Florida and elsewhere. These small birds congregate in flocks of a few dozen individuals and use their sensitive bills to feels around for small crustaceans underneath the sand's surface. If approached, they will walk away from you as a group, until they get scared and take off, at which point the entire flock will fly together to some nearby place, usually not more than a few dozen yards away.

I took these photos with my macro lens. A telephoto would have been a better choice, but I wasn't expecting to take any good photos of birds so I didn't have it with me. 

October Lightning

Last month we had some thunderstorms. I went out to the neighbor's dock and took some long exposure shots of the lightning, mostly around 30 seconds or so. This way, if lightning appeared, it would expose the sensor without me needing to try to press the shutter every time I saw lightning. You can tell it's a long exposure because the clouds blurred a bit as they moved.

Hurricane flowers in the rain

It's been raining a lot lately.  This has made it a good summer for the hurricane flowers. These bromeliads, scientific name Billbergia pyramidalis, tend to have their flowers after a storm has come through, and that's how they got their name. Like many other bromeliads, the hurricane flowers produce an inflorescence made up of lots of small flowers, and you can see a few of these in the photo below.

I also went to White City Park today, a nice park in Fort Pierce. I found these air plants there, growing on the limb of an oak tree overhanging a pond full of water lilies. Most of the water lilies had closed up, I guess they open in the morning. I'm not exactly sure of the species name of the air plants, it may be Tillandsia fasciculata. There are a lot of species of Tillandsia around here; Spanish moss and ball moss are both members of Tillandsia. Although these plants might seem like something that would be parasitic, like mistletoe, they actually just use the tree as a place to grow. They don't take its nutrients or water. The air plants get everything they need from rain, air, and dust.

Zebra longwings and Giant swallowtails

Note: This post was written on October 2, but I've been having problems with Blogger so I haven't been able to post until now. 

Today I tried to take some photos of butterflies in flight. Some of the photos came out better than others but they are challenging to photograph. They don't stay in a place where they'll be in focus. I found that it was easiest to choose a high ISO setting, use manual focus, and a fast shutter speed, like 1/500 second. I also used the screen on the back of the camera, instead of the viewfinder. This first photo is one of the best I took today. The other photos depict a giant swallowtail that I found under a banyan tree.

Night Blooming Cereus

Last night, the night blooming cereus bloomed. These are cacti that hang from palm trees, and they're where dragonfruit come from. Usually when ours grow dragonfruit, racoons end up eating them. The fruit is sweet but kind of bland, and they have a very striking appearance. If you buy them in the store, they are expensive.

I decided to take some photos of the flowers because the air was still. They're very large, pretty flowers, but it's kind of pointless to try to take a photo of them if there's wind, as your photo will be blurry, and if you use the flash the white petals can get all overexposed and then your photo looks too bright and too low in contrast. So here's my photo, of the inside of the flower. I used a flashlight to shine light into the flower from the side, and used an 8 second exposure. I used f/25 because I wanted a wide depth of field, so all the parts of the flower would be focused as well as possible.

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.