With my Lensbaby Sweet 35 optic and macro converter, I had a grand time today photographing water drops. Here are two of my most successful images from this afternoon. The top image is a spent bloom on the Cleyera shrub I have been writing about lately. The leaf in my second image belongs to a vine clinging to a pecan tree, a vine that I have not been able to identify (probably a nonnative cultivar of some sort).
From my latest Piney Woods Church Road outing, here are two spider images. The first is what has been tentatively identified by the folks at BugGuide on Facebook as a spider egg sac, attached to a horsehair on a barbed wire fence. The second is an Orchard Orbweaver (Leucauge venusta) that has just captured an ant in its web, and is at work securing its next meal. Both were shot with my Lensbaby Composer Pro with Sweet 35 optic and a 16 mm macro converter.
After a spell of near-monsoonal rain this afternoon, I set out on another expedition with my Lensbaby Composer Pro with Sweet 35 optic. This time, instead of the 8 cm macro converter from yesterday, I used a 16 mm one. That translated into still more close-up photographs than the ones I took yesterday. I spent over an hour wandering Piney Woods Church Road, a goodly part of it trying to focus on water droplets. I discovered (no great surprise here) that the water droplet comes into focus twice: once the exterior surface is in focus, and at a different point when the central reflection was more or less in focus.
On my way back home, I also casually snapped this shot of a goatsbeard (I think), its bloom finished, but still retaining beauty and mystery.
This photograph verges, perhaps, on excessive minimalism (if there is such a term), but I find it entrancing somehow. Three spiderweb lines, ultimately connecting parts of a sweetgum leaf to each other, preserve the memory of previous journeys. It seems fitting, somehow, to consider where I have gone, as I reach Day 180 and rapidly approach the halfway point in my own pilgrimage.
On my return from Piney Woods Church Road today, I paused along the driveway to photograph an immense American beautyberry bus (Callicarpa americana) in bloom. A Georgia native that I have seen many times further north in the state and obtained from a native plant nursery a few years back, it has taken well to our yard. I think this photograph captures the way the Lensbaby Sweet 35 optic can produce a pleasant blur in an image.
Here is another photograph with my Lensbaby Composer Pro with Sweet 35 Optic earlier this afternoon. A rain storm had ended; as I type this, another, more dramatic, storm is waiting on our doorstep. This was an unusual case (for me, at least) in which an image I found passable in color looks quite lovely and a bit mysterious converted to black and white. A droplet of water clings to a grapevine; a second water droplet on the same vine is an out-of-focus spot of brightness to its left.
This afternoon, I ventured to Piney Woods Church Road with my Lensbaby Sweet 35 Optic for the first time. The Sweet 35 produces a “sweet spot” of focus (one that, through tilting the optic, can be shifted to any part of the frame). A well-built manual focus lens, it has a learning curve (particularly when paired with an extension ring, as I did, for macro images). It produces a lot of chromatic aberration — a “halo”, often of purple, surrounding darker objects against a bright background. At the very end of my walk, in my own yard, I finally took an image that, to me, embodies the possibilities of Lensbaby for color photography — a lovely shot of some beautyberry in bloom. Meanwhile, here is a caterpillar who I saw on the underside of a pin cherry leaf. It is almost certainly a Radcliffe’s Dagger Moth Caterpillar (Acronicta radcliffei). I took this photo with my camera pointed upward, using my tilting screen on the camera to bring the caterpillar into focus. For some reason, this photo reminds me of the hookah-smoking caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland.
As I turned onto Piney Woods Church Road this afternoon, I noticed this tiny orange and black moth, with a wingspan of about a quarter inch, resting on a the leaf of a sapling. More precisely, this moth appears to be doing insect yoga. With some rapid-fire help from BugGuide folks on Facebook, I was able to identify it as the Skullcap Skeletonizer Moth (Prochoreutis inflatella). My Internet research has failed to reveal why it strikes this particular pose.
On my way down Piney Woods Church Road this morning, I chanced upon this assassin bug perched on a tulip poplar leaf. We saw each other at about the same time. Every time I moved my camera close for a shot, the bug would slowly back up, then hide himself (herself?) on the other side of an available leaf or stem. The process was so slow that I was reminded of Japanese kabuki theater. I took many, many photos before I secured this crisp portrait. I have to confess that this insect looks almost cuddly, with its furry quality and dangling proboscis. The proboscis functions like a drinking straw; the bug attacks other insects, injecting toxin that dissolves their body cells, which the bug then drinks up. Sometimes appearances can be deceptive, though I still wouldn’t mind having one of these as a Gund.
With help from BugGuide folks on Facebook, I was later able to determine that this bug was most likely the nymph form of the Wheel Bug (Arilus cristatus).
On my Piney Woods Church Road walk this afternoon, I glimpsed a small and rather evasive gray-brown butterfly, pausing to rest for a moment on one leaf, then darting off to another one if I tried to get too close. Still, with some patience, I finally managed to take this photograph. The butterfly is a Carolina Satyr (Hermeuptychia sosybius), one of the most common of the satyr butterflies in the Southeast. The Carolina Satyr frequent shaded woodland areas but also ventures out onto suburban lawns.
