Topical Salve

Things you don’t see a lot of where I live:

1) Temperatures of 38C (100F) in November.
2) Mantids in Greek cafes.

Yesterday I saw both. Perhaps the mantis was there to get out of the heat and sample the falafel?

Once again, my macro shot of an insect is in soft focus. I can blame the camera this time, though. No manual focus capability on my phone.

I half expected this insect to either jump onto my phone or fly onto to my hat while I was taking its picture.* Instead it stoically posed for me, then scampered up the glass once I was done.

* If you subscribe to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, then there exists some universe where I was screaming like a little girl whilst flailing my arms about in public (in 38C heat, no less) yesterday, much to the amusement of my lunch companion.

Damselfly. Named such because of its penchant for playing coy, luring intrepid insect photographers close, then flying away just before coming into focus only to land close by, enticing the photographer to try again and again in a cruel, flirtatious dance.*

And like their namesake (and pretty much anything else), they photograph best in morning or evening light. Except when flying, and shutter speed is king.

* I could be wrong.

I opened up the user and comment feature for this blog for those who feel the need to publicly comment on my posts.

Actually I did this a few days ago but failed to activate the CAPTCHA plug-in. This resulted in a slew of suspicious looking user registrations, so I took the liberty to wipe them all out after turning on the CAPTCHA plug-in. My sincerest apology if you registered and are actually human and not a spam bot. Please re-register. I’m hoping the CAPTCHA will weed out most of the spam bots.

In flight. Not from the rear. (In focus goes without saying.) That is the Holy Grail of photography for me.

Using the hummingbird equivalent of crack cocaine to attract the photography subject and get them to ignore their fight-or-flight response to a large lens looming a couple beak lengths away feels like cheating, though.

Gift horse. Mouth. Averting my eyes, and pressing the shutter button.

My family was at the beach this past weekend. In the wash, buried in the sand amongst the sand fleas and bivalves, my wife found a digital camera. Nifty thing, these newer cameras. They’re water resistant, usually to 3 meters or so. And they can take some abuse. Say being buried in the sand in saltwater.

This particular camera remained water tight from the point it was lost to the time it was found. After rinsing the sand out of its crevices (a very strange sensation, deliberately putting electronics under running water), and drying it off, I managed to download the pictures off the memory card.

I know this has been done before with rather dramatic, and most likely unrepeatable, results, but I’d be very interested in seeing if the owner of this camera can be located via the power of the Internet. I believe the person in the photo at the bottom of this post is the owner of the camera (She is the only one in the photos on the memory card that was doing self portraits). If you are the owner of the camera, and you’re reading this post, contact me via email (see the about page. Your email just has to get past Google’s spam filters), and convince me you’re the owner. I’ll mail the camera and all your pictures back to you.

The camera was found on a beach in San Diego, California. I’ve taken the bother to remove the EXIF data from the photo to discourage the more unscrupulous out there from trying to score a free camera.

Okay, Internet. Go!

Me (back from a walk in the forest): I’m back.
Wife: Did you put on insect repellent before you went out?
Me: That would defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it?

In honor of the start of this year’s Tour de France, I present to you my favorite Tour de France comic (first published on 27 July 2007!):

Need a Tour primer? I drew one of those, too.

Upon spying a 2 cm tuft of red fur crawling through the grass, the following thoughts crossed my mind:

1) I wish I had my camera.
2) What IS that thing?
3) Bright colors. Hmm… Probably shouldn’t touch it.

While observing it, the tuft started burrowing into the lawn. Fortunately, it being Southern California with watering restrictions being imposed by the city since last summer (one good thing about droughts, I guess), the ground was quite solid, and resisted its efforts. This afforded me the opportunity to go grab my camera.

When I returned, the red tuft had not made any progress. Unfortunately, burrowing into a lawn does not a good photograph make. Obviously, the next step was to coax the little red tuft to higher ground. Recalling thought #3, I found a small stick and started prodding at the red tuft. Prodding the abdomen did nothing for me — it tried even harder to burrow into the lawn. So I moved the stick to where I estimated its head to be and started poking away. This seemed to irritate the red tuft to no end. It started the insect equivalent of screaming at me — rubbing two abdominal plates together that let off a high pitched shrill. My perseverance was finally rewarded when the little red tuft backed out of its much-too-shallow burrow and started crawling across the lawn to get away from me.

I put down the stick and madly worked the focus ring of the camera while trying to get in front of the remarkably-quick-for-its-size red tuft. After many tens of photos, and an incursion far deeper into my neighbor’s yard than I intended, I withdrew from the red tuft and let it go on its way.

Back inside the house, after deleting the out-of-focus images (read: most of them), the hunt was on again. This time to answer thought #2. Bugguide.net informs me that the red tuft is a velvet ant — genus Dasymutilla — though I’m not able to guess a species based on the photos in their database. The thing is, it’s not actually an ant. It’s a wasp. The wingless ones, like the one I was pestering in the lawn, are the females (my Star Trek-inspired excuse for keeping the picture even though she’s in soft focus. Plus, you know, red shirt.). They crawl around looking for ground-dwelling bees’ nests or other wasp’s nests in which to lay their eggs. The velvet ant larvae either feed on the hosts, or the food stockpiles of the hosts.

All very interesting, but that’s not what gave me pause. What gave me pause was the other common name for the velvet ant — cow killer. It gets this name from its ability to inflict a sting so sever it is said to be able to kill a cow.

Kill.

A cow.

Sure, it’s most likely hyperbole (not willing to test that theory myself, thank you), but still. This is probably not an insect you should be handling (kudos to me for thought #3!), or pissing off by prodding it with a stick (um…), then getting nose-close to, to take macro photos of.

… Yeah.

The other night, I happened to glance up at the night sky and saw a bright light to the east.

“I bet that’s Jupiter or Saturn,” I thought to myself, so I went inside and grabbed my old, trusty binoculars and had a look. Sure enough, the bright light resolved itself into a larger bright light, with four smaller lights surrounding it — Jupiter.

And that’s when the astronomy bug bit me again.

Perhaps “bit” is the wrong word. It’s more like the varicella-zoster virus. The first infection is the worst, and you end up with chickenpox. In the case of astronomy, you go out and buy yourself the best telescope you can afford (mine was a Meade ETX-90 — the one before computer tracking became dirt cheap to put on mounts). For those who aren’t consumed by the infection, the virus eventually goes into remission and the telescope collects dust in the corner, or you dontate it to a school or sell it (mine went to a high school with an astronomy club).

Unfortunately, remission does not mean cure. Later in life the virus can reassert itself. Glancing at Jupiter that fateful night was the trigger. And like varicella-zoster asserting itself as shingles, I find myself thinking about good telescopes for sidewalk astronomy — something easily pulled out on a whim to look at the night sky, streetlights be damned.

And like shingles, this too shall pass. I just have to bear with the metaphorical itching, and try to remind myself of all the bad things about astronomy. The late nights. The bugs. The lack of dark skies where I live. Meanwhile, I will take the occasional through-the-eyepiece picture of the moon with my digital camera and binoculars, and read up on the latest and greatest telescopes for sale.

… and a girl and a boy and a girl and another girl and another boy and …