Talks and Bugs

It’s been a funny couple of weeks, all of a sudden I find I have a lot of work on. I have a Project that I have been working on for the last 6 months that has a deadline in the beginning of May that I am trying to complete, I am nearly there just in the editing stage now. However I have also been asked to give a talk at a local garden centre on insects and pollination also in early May and this has been occupying my time over the last couple of weeks trying to put together a collection of images of insects in action. The basic. strategy involves sitting in the garden with a cup of coffee, camera and macro lens watching for activity on the flowers, then trying desperately to get a shot as quickly as possible. To make things easier I have however been using a new technique with the camera, I set it up on manual to a fast shutter speed 1/1000th of a sec or faster and set the aperture to f16-22, I then set the ISO on the camera to automatic which can result in ISO settings of 2000 or higher. As someone who learnt on film and always tried to use the lowest ASA/ISO rating possible this is quite terrifying. The magic of course all happens in post processing, I use Lightroom combined with Topaz to clean up and de-noise the image, the results are stunning. looking back on images I have taken in the (recent) past I find it incredible what you can do now. I can remember when to enlarge an image with minimal grain you had to make an internegative, basically rephotographing you original negative on ultraslow film of if you where using transparency film use a slide copier, basically the same process but hours of work rather than seconds and no worries about dust, dirt and fingerprints. Lightroom also allows you to darken or blur out the background easily, again something you could do in the darkroom, (in fact something I had to pay a printer to do for me when working in colour due to my colour blindness) which can be essential when photographing insects.

All that is left for me to do now is to write the talk!