(Warning: This particular blog isn’t really very photography related other than that I took a picture of the subject at hand, but I’m blogging about it anyway, so sue me.)

Our home in Florida had a pool. It was a nice sized pool (35,000 gallon) and looked very pretty in its soft blue tranquility. Most evenings I would turn on the pool’s light and the entire back deck area would light up in this wonderful soft blue. However, some evenings I wanted something a bit less intense. I wanted something a bit quieter. But I didn’t know what to do. However, one day it just sort of hit me out of nowhere: floating candle holders!

I thought about the idea for a few days and determined that the best material for the floats would be styrofoam. So I went out and purchased a handful of round styrofoam discs, some blue paint and some small, votive type candles. Into the styrofoam I carved out round slots for the candles to sit down into, painted the discs and inserted the candles. I lit the candles and set them in the pool and they were very cool. Each disc had slots for three candles and the four five of these things floating about looked smashing. However, there was one problem. The slightest breeze would push these things around the pool and they would all wind up huddled together at one end of the pool. While I didn’t actually make this addition, it occurred to me that attaching a fishing line with some lead weights would likely keep these floating candelabras in place.

Fast forward a handful of years to June 2007.

I am a member of the Social Committee for our community. Last year we put together a community luau with food, music and games. We discussed our options for decorating the pool area when I mentioned my candle floats that I had made a few years back in Florida. My Social Committee cohorts liked my idea and authorized me to make a bunch for the pool for the party. I considered my options and what I thought might look nice and came up with this:

Pretty nifty, eh?

It’s really quite simple: a styrofoam disc painted green with a plastic drink cup glued at the center (and a candle glued to the inside of the cup). I then pin four plastic tropical-looking leaves around the centered cup and then lay a plastic lei around the cup. Having learned my lesson in Florida I attach a lead weight via fishing line and an eye hook to the bottom of the disc. I cut the line long enough to position each float individually in the pool (as the pool changes depth), which takes a bit of time, but it gives me an excuse to be in the pool!

It’s been a bit since I last posted and in that time I’ve uploaded three separate batches of photos to my Flickr account. I still haven’t really devised a scheme with which I’m particularly happy regarding my work flow, but oddly enough it isn’t the work flow of actually working with the photos of which I’m displeased. Instead it is simply the transference of images from the three different media cards to the computer. Thus far I have been keeping each cards image files in their own separate folders on my hard drive. Why? I don’t know. Maybe just so that I can quickly check any given card to make certain I have actually transferred images to the computer BEFORE I do something goofy like format the card. Anyway. Let’s dive into the various interesting things that have been occurring photography wise, shall we?

Apparently failure is an option. About 10 or so days ago we were enjoying some incredibly nice weather. Cooler than average temperatures and low humidity were ruling both our days and nights. And this particular night I was lounging in the television room of the west wing of the mansion, while a mostly naked Kate Isitt fed me peeled grapes and pressed the buttons on the t.v. remote for me, when I noticed the stark white light of the waxing moon upon the lawn. “Hum,” thought I. “Perhaps a chance to snap a few pics of the moon this evening?” but the pull of the television, the peeled grapes and the mostly naked Ms. Isitt kept me from making my way out of doors.

Another hour or so passed and I again noted the lovely light upon the lawn and could now see the moon hanging in the night sky, high enough that it was above the tall trees to the south of my view. Extending my apologies to Ms. Isitt I made for my camera kit and tripod and headed out into the wilds that are the 1,276 acres upon which my mansion sits. I stumbled about in the dark for a bit before turning my eyes heavenwards to find not only the moon, in all Her glory, but clouds.

Clouds. Fast moving clouds. And plenty of them. “Damn.” thought I. “It was perfectly clear earlier,” but I had elected to stay put and now I was about to pay the price for my laziness. I set up my kit and played with my manual settings until I had found one that I thought would provide a decent result and offer a starting place for making adjustments. Regardless the clouds would have none of it and left me with this sort of mess.

Or this instead.

“Clouds be damned!” I mused. “I”m going to stay out here and keep snapping pics until I get something that is remotely useful.” And maybe I did?

However, before this particular evening (and around the July 4th holiday) we experienced some rather rainy weather. But this rain was prefaced with something we don’t get too often: lightning and thunder. I have enjoyed pictures taken by others of lightning, but have yet to find myself in a position to return the favour. Until now, so to speak. As I could see the flashes of lightning and hear the occasional distant grumble of thunder I thought I should get out and try to capture some of nature’s light show, especially since there wasn’t yet any rain. Unfortunately the 2,413 acres of land upon which my mansion sits is very wooded and not conducive to photographing lightning on the horizon. Clearly I needed to get into the helicopter and have Pilot fly me to a field whereupon I might have a chance to capture some lightning.

I eventually settled upon a field not too far from my mansion and got myself set up. This wasn’t going to be easy though. The lightning wasn’t the sort whereby there is a sudden flash of light zipping across the sky, branching out in all sorts of directions, but what is often referred to as heat lightning. It would come and go so quickly I couldn’t get off a shot that actually captured anything so I turned to pointing the camera into the sky, setting a longish exposure and hoping I caught something. Anything. What I caught was crap as evidenced below.

And this image is the best of them all. Pitiful. I might have gotten some better shots as time went by, but the arrival of rain sent me and Pilot scurrying to the protection of the helicopter and thus ended my chance to bring to others the same joy they have brought to me.

However, not everything photography-related has been a dismal failure of late. I have managed to pull a few rabbits out of my hat, if you will, and these instances have made my failures feel less-so in retrospect. I have had some great luck with the pets of late. Both the cats and dogs have been more cooperative than usual, but with the dogs it could be simply that they were either asleep or too tired to give me any shit. The one really great situation has been my ability to get a few really super shots of one of the cats, Pumpkin. Pumpkin is, for all intents and purposes, feral. While having lived with us for almost three years he, and his sister Little One, have never properly socialized with we mere mortals. However, Pumpkin was very, very cooperative a few days back and I was able to get a couple of really nice pics of him like this one.

Over the July 4th holiday we had guests from Florida visiting us in the way of our best friends, George and Caroline, and their daughter, Rowan. We haven’t seen them in about two years (for a variety of reasons, but money being the biggest impediment. well it’s not that money is the impediment, but that the lack thereof is the impediment) and it was truly super to have them about for a week. We enjoyed spending time chatting and otherwise farting around and it gave me a chance to take some pics like this one.

You, my most cherished readers, may recall how poorly went a recent visit to the Butterfly House at the Cox Arboretum of Dayton, Ohio. Well, while there that first time I noticed how nice the arboretum was and thought to myself that I should return on another day and try to take some pictures of whatever I could find. There were lakes and ponds, so ducks, frogs and dragonflies may have been in order. There were flowers, so bees may have been in order. And who knows what else may have been there that I simply missed on our other adventure to the butterfly house. As such I elected to head back earlier this week (Monday I think) with camera kit in tow (but no tripod).

I arrived in what might be best described as very late afternoon/very early evening such that the shadows were obvious, but not yet pronounced. I had my entire kit (camera body and all four lenses including the very heavy 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM monster) with me as I didn’t know which lens or lenses I might make best use of, but I elected to start with the 100-400mm just in case I came across dragonflies. Funny how it takes a huge and heavy lens to snap a decent pic (at distance) of a very tiny and very light insect. I must say I was not disappointed.

I will concede the dragonflies were less-than-cooperative as they typically wouldn’t sit still for more than a few seconds, which resulted in a lot of nicely composed, but poorly focused images. Alas, I’m not complaining as this was nirvana! Onwards and upwards though as there were bees to be found all over the park!

I had more luck with the bees, but they too kept moving quite a bit as bees are wont to do….or so I assume. While taking pics of the bees (and flowers) I was struck by the beauty that can be found in the death-throws of a flower. I have noticed this before (and noted such as well), but was again struck by this bit of information.

Beyond the bees and dragonflies I was lucky enough to grab a very nice shot of a bird and some landscape type shots of the grounds and its lakes/ponds.

Finally, there has been much in the way of photographs of clouds taken and posted by certain Flickr cohorts of mine. Puffy white clouds. Stormy clouds. Sunrise and sunset clouds. As for me though, not so much. Mostly it has been a matter of not seeing any clouds or cloud formations that seemed photo-worthy. Until recently that is. On my drive back home from the Cox Arboretum Mother Nature saw fit to add a little frosting to the delicious cake that was the arboretum.

As disappointing were my attempts at lightning pics and the moon stuff, I will confess that this recent trip to the arboretum, our friends visit, and the cooperative tame fauna more than made up for those minor setbacks. For a switch everything felt right and good.

I guess I should start looking over my shoulder now, eh?

My first real WP blog posting, which you can read here (and you should because if you haven’t you’re likely to contract malaria), went into no small detail about the process through which I went that led me to the rather unexpected purchase of the Canon EOS 40D digital Single Lens Reflex (SLR) camera.  It occurred to me today that I hadn’t really said much about the camera since that original posting.  Clearly most of my blogs have been about the actual process of taking pictuers, processing pictures, and most importantly how Mother Nature is bound and determined to piss me off to no end by thwarting so many of my photographic opportunities.  As such I thought this a good moment, some six months into ownership, to write something valuable and prosaic about my lovely, lovely camera.

It’s great!

Okay.  That’s not particularly helpful, but what can I say?  Do I still lust after the Nikon D300?  Yes.  But in all honesty that pagan lust has given way to idle worship.  I’m certain it’s a great camera, but am I disappointed with my 40D?  Not in the slightest.  So what have I learned about my lovely, lovely 40D?

First, it fits my hand perfectly.  And I mean perfectly.  It fills my palm.  The grip fits snugly inside my cupped fingers.  It’s large enough that all my fingers, including my pinky, actually utilize the grip.  (as an aside this is one place that the D300 did not shine for me - I found some of the controls on the back of the camera were in the way of where my thumb naturally wants to fall)  And with the addition of the battery grip (which also helps with vertical shooting) the camera becomes even more comfortable to use, especially when shooting vertically.  However, I will concede that the 40D (like the D300) are larger cameras and that having a larger hand is….well….handy.  At 6′4″ I have large hands and I find ALL of the smaller entry-level dSLRs (Canon Rebel/400 series, Nikon D-series, etc.) to be too small.  None of the controls fall readily to a finger and my hand simply overwhelms the camera body.  Naturally this isn’t the case for most Americans as they aren’t 6′4″ and I have had more than one salesperson tell me that these smaller entry-level dSLRs are really geared more towards women (think soccer moms) so they need to be smaller for their typically smaller hands.

Second, the battery life has been exceptional.  Far better than I had imagined it would be.  I shoot in both RAW and JPEG and have the camera set to activate the dust removal system upon both start-up and shut-down.  I admit that I do not use the built in flash so I cannot speak to how it may effect battery life, but I have nothing but praise for battery life with this camera.

Third, this may be an odd item to which to offer praise, but I really like the owner’s manual.  It’s clear and concise, which isn’t always the case with owner’s manuals for complicated consumer electronics.  I also appreciate the fact the owner’s manual comes on a CD-ROM and that I can download it as a PDF from the Canon USA web site.  It also comes with a fair bit of Canon software including such so that you can control your new Canon EOS 40D from your computer.  Nikon makes you pay extra for this software so kudos to Canon.

Fourth, like any good camera should, all the really important settings can be changed without resorting to utilizing the menu system.  Instead these settings (white balance, ISO, metering, etc.) can be changed via the selection of one of a handful of buttons on top of the camera and then the movement of one of two dials.  I’m not saying that only my Canon 40D offers up this immediate flexibility, but it’s good to have right there at one’s finger tips as all the buttons and dials can be reached by either a finger or thumb.

Now to be fair and accurate, not everything is sunshine and bunnies with the Canon 40D.  Of course I’m certain no camera is perfect, but it is the constant pursuit of perfection that yields (hopefully) better cameras each year.  To that end I wish my Canon did these things better.

First, the viewfinder should be both larger (offering 100% viewing - just what the camera sensor sees) and brighter.  The Nikon D300 clearly beat the 40D in my opinion when I was switching back and forth between these two excellent cameras.  If I had to pick which was more important to me I’d prefer the brighter viewfinder as I can live with the 95% viewing area that is the current situation for the 40D.  The Nikon’s viewfinder was wonderful.  I felt like I wasn’t really looking through a viewfinder at all.  Canon can and should be doing better here.

Second, and this is going to sound strange, maybe even petty, but why couldn’t the folks at Canon have included a built-in digital version of the viewfinder grid lines?  First, why do I want this?  Simple.  Sometimes one doesn’t notice that they do not have their camera level before the press the shutter release button.  But with grid lines it is so easy to make a quick check of how level is the camera before shooting.  The D300 has this feature, but the camera does cost about $500 more than the 40D.  However, my $250 Canon A630 digital compact camera has the grid line feature for the LCD display.  How can a $250 Canon have this feature, but not the $1,600 (with 17-85 kit lens) Canon dSLR?  I really cannot imagine that it would have cost much of anything to add this feature.  Maybe it’s something that will come along as a firmware upgrade?  I don’t know.  I DO know that it’s a feature I want and have used and expected in this camera.  My only other option (short of returning to the A630 or purchasing a D300) is to purchase the little screens that you can swap in the viewfinder.  A pain and expense that should not be visited upon a modern dSLR owner.  Period.  Are you listening Canon?

Third, while the camera has the requisite buttons for changing the most important settings, they are, in my opinion, too small and too identical to one another.  They lay in a line along the top of the camera, above the LCD status display window.  The Nikon D300 makes these buttons larger, but does nothing else to differentiate them from one another, but at least being larger is a step in the right direction.  I confess that I’m not certain what would be the best way to change the buttons to make them more distinct from one another, but certainly something could be done to rectify this minor ergonomic mistake.

Fourth and finally, I think it would have been nice if more control could have been given to the focus points.  With the 40D you have 13 focus points.  You can select each one individually or select them all and let the camera decide which it thinks are the most relevant focus points to use.  While this is fine under many circumstances it isn’t best for all situations.  I would really like to see the 40D offer the ability to select a specific group of focus points (like the three on the far right) so that one can focus on a general area and not on a specific spot within that general area.  Again, the D300 offers this ability, but it does come with a cost:  more cash.

So what is the bottom line here?  It would be grossly unfair of me to compare and contrast my 40D to any other dSLR in any meaningful way as I haven’t owned or operated any other dSLR.  While I spent an awful lot of time researching and playing around with them it isn’t the same thing as living with one day after day for six months as I have done with my 40D.

So the real question is:  Am I happy with my Canon EOS 40D dSLR?  And the answer is yes.  It is doing everything I want and need and does it with a minimum of fuss.  It can do far more than I have yet asked of it, but I know that with time I will explore the other abilities of the camera and make use of those that I find to my liking and needs.  Of course it’s very likely that I would have been quite happy with a Nikon D300 (but a little lighter in the wallet), but I made my decision and all those original feelings of buyers remorse have disappeared and been replaced by the excitement that comes from taking pictures with a great camera.

Wow!  Two postings in one day!  Can you handle it?  Are you man/woman enough?  Will it change your life for the better?  Will it give you fresher breath?  Well just wait and see!

(enough of that nonsense)

This evening, as I drove to the local store for milk, I noticed how much more prolific was the quantity of firefly lust than had been evident over the past few days.  “Huuummmm,” thought I.  “This may be a good evening to once again try the firefly photo thingy.”  A quick check of the sky indicated some cloud cover and since this wasn’t total cloud coverage I was willing to take the risk that things wouldn’t turn out like last time, which you can refresh youself with here.

Into the car went my camera kit, tripod and self, and off to my local favourite field did I drive.  Mind you, there was a period of about an hour between my drive to the local store for milk and when I left for my local favourite field.  This was because it was still too early to go to the field when I went to the store and noticed the very busy and very horny fireflies doing their naughty mating dance.  During this time period clouds had begun to gather and a storm was brewing unbeknown to me.  So I arrive at my field and things are, as they were last time, pretty awful.  Way too many clouds and way too little in the way of pagan firefly lust.  Rats.

But wait a minute.  Last time this occured I had a moment of minor brilliance.  I thought outside the box and did something different.  I made lemonade when Mother Nature (BITCH!) gave me lemons.  So what to do….what to do.  Well, the clouds were rolling in and there was much in the way of what we call heat lightning, which if you are really curious about you can read about here.  So I thought “Why not try some timed exposures of the clouds and try to capture some lightning?”

Unlike the success I enjoyed with the insects buzzing around the lightpole, I’m not feeling it tonight regarding the lightning.  I stayed and shot a number of pictures before the rain began to fall and forced me to make a hasty retreat to the car.  Nothing that appeared on the camera’s LCD screen looked of interest, but I’ll check closer later.  Still.  It was good of me to once again think outside the box.  I only wish I had experienced some of the same success as last time. But the upside is that I am home drowning my sorrows in milk and cookies.

This past week my happy little household (em, excuse me, “mansion”) was host to some friends from out of state.  Included in this gathering was a lovely almost-three-year-old little girl who I knew would need a trip to our local butterfly house at the Cox Arboretum.  I have not been there myself, but thought this a good time to make the trip.  After all, what child doesn’t like butterflies?  And for me it would be a chance to drag along the camera kit and snap lovely after lovely picture of these gorgeous insects.  In addition, as the Butterfly Festival starts in less than a week I assumed the butterfly house would be rife with picture opportunities.  However, as this blog has repeatedly intimiated, Mother Nature cannot be trusted.

We toddled along, as one does with a three-year-old in tow, and took in the lovely surrounds of the park.  I stopped to snap a picture here and a picture there and grew ever so excited about the pending foray into the house of butterflies.  We eventually arrived, made our way inside and were what?  What is the best word or phrase to describe the moment?  Underwhelmed?  Disappointed?  Irritated?  Desiring to take Mother Nature by the neck and throttle her till she turned blue?  Well, any of these words would suffice so I’ll leave it to you to select the one you wish.

I think you could count the number of butterflies on one hand.  Certainly no more than two.  Disaster.  Debacle.  What three year old would be beside herself with glee and excitement when the butterflies were more rare than honesty in the current White House administration?  And FORGET about the three year old….what about me!  What was I going to photograph?  I had dragged my kit around in the rather unpleasant heat and humidity of this particular day just so that I would get glorious pics of wonderful and possibly exotic Lepidoptera.  But no.  Once again Mother Nature had shown herself for what she truly is:  one mean chick!  Still.  I didn’t come away completely empty handed, which is something I suppose.

Of course, the insanity didn’t just end there.  No.  That would have been way too easy.  However, in all fairness this particular instance of insanity was completely self-induced and in no way related to that bitch, Mother Nature. (unless, of course, you consider that I am really nothing more than a somewhat domesticated beast of nature and, therefore, directly related to that spiteful Mother Nature)  Today I transferred the image files from my camera’s media card to my laptop, where I was going to review them and select the ones for upload to Flickr.  As has been my trend of late, I worked with the RAW image files instead of the JPEGs.  I reviewed each image, made the necessary corrections (very little really - a few tilts, but a fair bit of cropping), and thought about performing a batch operation to create JPEG files at the requisite file size that I use for upload to flickr (1024 x 683 pixels).  Normally I use two different apps to perform these steps, but today I opted to use just the one (Capture One 4) to work with the RAW files and to create and size the JPEG files.  But I ran into a problem, of my own making of course, when it came time to convert my edited RAW files into JPEGs.  As I had a number of images I wanted to make use of the batch processing feature.  This way I could convert to JPEG AND re-size to 1024×683 en masse.

But I couldn’t get it to work.  All the files were ready to go and all were selected, but when I pressed “Process” the software would only process the first image in the group.  “Okay,” thought I.  “What now?”  Well the first thing I opted to do was check that I had, indeed, actually selected all the files.  Check.  Next I opted to consult the Help file, which was full of useful information, but only confirmed, at least at first glance, that I was doing everything correctly.  Check.  Confusion and irritation began to cloud my mind.  I opted to check online at the software manufacturer’s web site, where I came across a short instructional video which covered this very endeavor (batch processing).  Again, I felt certain that I was doing everything correctly, but what is the saying?  Is it “The devil is in the details”?  Well it seemed that I was doing everything correctly EXCEPT that I needed to be pressing the laptop’s Shift key when I selected the Process icon on the screen.

Awwwww shit.

So neither the trip to the butterfly house nor my attempts at batch processing went quite as flawlessly as I had hoped or anticipated.  But let me say this:  I would rather be out having a bad day with my camera than a good day doing a lot of other things.  I so love just the process of taking pictures.  The feel of the camera gear in my hands.  The sound of the shutter clicking.  The minor shift of the lens when the image stabilization kicks in.  The quick thought processes that occur when trying to compose and frame a shot on the fly.  It’s all grand.  It’s all a high.  I sometimes think that the actual pictures mean less than the process by which I obtained them.  But I’ll have to ponder that further and save those thoughts for another day.

There is truly so much to learn, know and understand about photography. Thousands of books are dedicated to the endeavor. Thousands of web sites too. It is truly overwhelming by any standard and I won’t lie to you. I don’t roll that way. I have only scratched the surface regarding the information available to me. Then again, I’m not looking to turn this into a major hobby. At least not at this time and maybe not ever. I’m simply looking to enjoy myself and where I find that I want to do better I will scour the available sources for information to help me.

To that end I have read just a modicum of information regarding the use of a flash unit (strobe…whatever you prefer to call it) in photography. One of the first things I purchased, besides the camera and a lens, was a flash unit. I don’t know why as I really had no idea how to use it appropriately. All of my prior uses of flash with my 35mm SLR film cameras led to the typical flash photograph: washed out in a burst of white light. But I didn’t wish this to be the case again. So I did some reading; just a very little. But that bit of reading has helped me immeasurably. Or so I think.

My latest upload of pics to Flickr are all flash pics I took today or yesterday. I utilized the principle of bouncing the flash off a nearby wall or ceiling to soften the light and to add depth to the subject matter. I must say that I’m very pleased with the results. Not perfection by any stretch of the imagination, but so far superior to ANYTHING I have previously done with a flash in my lifetime.

Granted, the camera was in full auto mode as I really don’t have enough information to use the flash in conjunction with any other setting. At least not yet. And as such the depth-of-field is more shallow than I would like, but the experience left me feeling very satisfied and that is such a pleasant and unusual feeling when it comes to trying something new with the camera.

I have commented upon other folks pictures of my lack of luck photographing particular bugs of late.  It would seem that certain folks in particular have had exceptional luck snapping away at my most favourite of insects, the dragonfly (see her work here).  Well no more!

I managed a few great shots this morning of a dragonfly and bee that were both INCREDIBLY cooperative about having their pictures taken.  Mother Nature must have had a change of heart about me and I certainly do appreciate it!

Please to enjoy……

It was with great hopes and expectations that I ventured forth from my house this evening to capture images of the elusive firefly (a.k.a. lightning bug).  I had my place selected.  It was completely dark, or, should I say, the sun had completely set and the western sky was no longer aglow as it had been the previous night when I first tried this adventure.  So I left my visiting guests at home, comfortable with some DVDs and a chance to unwind, and made my way to my selected location with camera kit and tripod in the back seat.

Things were not off to a smashing start.  While the sky was darkened, which solved the problem of last night, the fireflies were again uncooperative.  Where they had been an explosion of firefly lust, a firefly orgy if you will, just two nights previous, there was now a lackluster show of bio-luminescent last chance gasping in the domain of the firefly.  Oh well.  I was here and I was going to try this anyway.

I selected my 50mm prime lens hoping it’s superior aperture range may be handy, attached it to the camera, the camera to my tripod, setup my shot and pressed the shutter release button.  The camera’s clever electronics had selected an appropriately long exposure for the aperture I had settled upon and so I stood back and let my camera do its thing.  When the ‘click’ finally occured that told me the shutter curtain had closed I stood and stared at the LCD screen to see the wonder that was my work.  However, “wonder” wasn’t the best word to describe matters.  Something new was amiss and it wasn’t something I had noticed until my first image was completed:  too much light polution.

Having spent much of my childhood wanting to grow up to be an astronomer I was and am quite familiar with light polution and what it can mean to good night time observing, photographing, etc.  And ‘good’ wasn’t a word that was going to be used tonight to describe the photographic conditions.  Each long exposure yielded the same rather miserable results.  So between the lack of fireflies performing their mating dance AND the light polution I wasn’t really getting any results of merit.  Regardless I took a few pics and pondered my next move.

I concede I really wanted to just go home with my tail between my legs and call it an evening.  As I turned back towards my car, still contemplating my next move, I noticed the proliferation of insect life buzzing around a light in the parking lot.  Suddenly I was filled with photographic inspiration, which is really quite unusual as you may have noted from my Flickr photostream (not that I don’t love my pics, cuz I do, but they aren’t exactly on the bleeding edge of photography or art).  Still mounted to the tripod, I turned my camera around and aimed for the erratically flying insects and snapped a few pictures.  While they aren’t Ansel Adams work I confess that I thought it was fun.  Different.  Just having a lark.  And I’m pleased with the results.  I’m pleased because I thought, if only for a moment, outside the box.  I didn’t let conventional wisdom cloud my thinking.

Sufficiently inspired by this moment of clarity I started thinking if there might be another place where I could find fireflies that might also yield a better place from which to photograph them.  Maybe in the woods or near woods where the overhead clouds wouldn’t screw as much with my need to photograph these fireflies.  So I drove to the one place I suspected would provide such a chance and while the fireflies were more prolific in this location the issue of light polution remained.  As a very learned friend of mine once (or twice) said, drat and damn.

So my Flickr photostream has a few miserable shots of my firefly attempts, just to show that I’m not afraid to post failure, but also contains two images of the wildly erratic bugs zooming around the parking lot light, of which I’m rather pleased.

So I have learned…..no…..REleanred one very important fact regarding nighttime photography:  preferably no moon (unless that is what you are trying to photograph) and definitely no clouds!

Growing up in Florida I never saw fireflies (a.k.a. lightning bugs) until we vacationed elsewhere.  Such interesting little insects…doing their mating dance to the glow of a bioluminescent butt.  Once I moved up north, or mid-west if your prefer, I finally had a chance to live with these great little insects and would find myself enjoying their little light show when their time of the year would roll around.  And it is that time of the year here, in Ohio.

The other night my wife and I were driving home from someplace and as we came upon a field of tall grass I noticed the field was alight with the firefly mating dance.  There must have been thousands of these male fireflies moving up a few feet above the tall grass, trying desperately to entice the opposite sex.  We pulled over to enjoy this moment and it was then I thought “Hey!  I wonder if I could get a picture of this?” and I became very excited about the prospect.

I knew that what I could most likely do was take a timed exposure that would capture these little guys doing there dance and that my image would be just that:  a darkened field with little vertical streaks of light.  I really had no idea if this would at all work, but I certainly had nothing to lose by trying.

Tonight my wife and I returned to the field to try my photographic experiment.  Conveniently the field is on the way to our local airport, which we were heading to anyway as to pick up our friends from Florida who are coming to visit for a week.  So about 9:30 or so we arrived at the field, I set up my camera kit, took the longer exposure (15 seconds) and found that the evening sky was still too bright for this experiment to work.  At this time of the year there is still plenty of light in the western sky and this was the only direction in which I could shoot this particular field.  Alas, the experiment yielded no postive results, but it has given me the idea to try again, but at a later hour of the evening; say 10:30.

So tomorrow, with my best friend with me, I’m going to head back to that field with my camera kit and try this again.  Who knows….maybe I’ll have better luck this time!

If a poll were to be conducted of photographers and they were to name the single biggest mistake related to digital photography I imagine the results would be both quite interesting and very much all over the place.

And they would all be wrong.

Sure.  The wrong settings, whatever they are, can be quite annoying.  Even infuritating.  But that’s nothing.

Not having a fully charged and ready to go battery can provoke no small amount of blue language, especially when that one in a million photo op presents itself from nowhere.  But that is small potatoes too.

And even the horrible of horrible, a dead hard drive, filled with years worth of effort and work, isn’t quite as bad as the biggest mistake you can make in digital photography.

No.

What is the biggest mistake you can make in digital photography?  Do you really want to know?  Can you handle the truth?  I don’t know….I don’t think you can handle the truth.  But for now I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt.  After all, you look like a pretty groovy person and seem to have your head on straight so maybe, just maybe, you’ll be able to stare into this abyss and survive.

And I’ll let you in on a little secret…..this huge mistake isn’t just confined to digital photography.  Nope.  It spills over into other related areas and just makes your whole life feel like a giant waste of time.  So…are you ready?

The biggest mistake you can make in digital photography is……..window shopping.

Yes.  Window shopping.

And window shopping doesn’t have to be taken so literally these days as it also encompasses looking around online at cameras for sale.  And this doesn’t have to be just digital cameras.  It’s really ANY consumer electronic.

Think about it…..is there anything more annoying that being online and seeing the camera you bought just a short six months ago for a markedly lower price?  Or how about the large screen, HDTV television?  Or the MP3 player?  Or the laptop?

The list goes on.

So…can you imagine what I saw this evening before logging on to Word Press?  Yep.  My lovely camera at a markedly lower price than what I paid for it back in December.  When it was on Xmas sale.  And I swear…..I wasn’t even looking for my camera….it was just there….on the screen of the web site I was visting…..just staring me in the face and laughing at my stupid ass for having spent that much more for the very same product.

I suppose the only satisfaction I can take from this is that by not waiting for the price to inevitably drop and making the purchase in December 2007 I have enjoyed about seven months of photographing instead of wishing I had a camera.  And I’ve also made some nice friends in the process, which really makes the whole thing worthwhile.

But it still pisses me off to no end.