Small things and the limits of cameral equipment

Red ant 3, originally uploaded by imarsman.

Here's a photos of a small ant I took today. It turned out quite well, much better than with my previous non-SLR camera, but it points to a few things I'll be working on with my macro photography.

One of these macro issues I've just found out about is diffaction effects at small aperture settings. Here's a great article on the subject. Wikipedia has a nice article on part of the theory behind the issue. Essentially, the smaller the aperture allowing light to pass from the lens to the sensor or film, the more likely individual waves of light are to overlap with each other, creating fuzziness in the image. Other variables involved include the size of the sensor, the size of the individual sensor receptors, and the focal distance. Of course, the quality of the lens passing light to the sensor is an important factor as well. People say that one should be able to take good photos no matter what equipment one is using. This is true to a certain extent, of course. I am very happy with many photos taken with my previous non-SLR camera. However, smaller sensor size, smaller aperture, less sharp optics, and the inability to use flash made getting a sharp picture more difficult. The page I linked to above has a nice calculator that lets you figure out how small you can set your camera's aperture before diffaction effects manifest themselves. My camera at macro focal distance apparently can be set up to f14 or f16.

Availability of light is another issue with any photography. For my macro photographs when not in bright sunlight I've started to use my on-camera flash with a homemade diffuser at the end of the lens cut from a vinegar bottle. Unfortunately, with flash, the camera seems to want to set shutter speed to 1/60 second. At this speed motion blur can be an issue. I will try experimenting with setting ISO level to 400 or 800, seeing what using a wider aperture does, and when I am confident enough, setting shutter speed manually as well.

Another always-present issue with macro photography is the very shallow depth of focus one must deal with, also known as depth-of-field. Another nice page on the diffraction effects site (cambridgecolour.com) deals with depth-of-field. A nice calculator is included on this page as well that allows depth-of-field for varying focal lengths, subject distances, apertures, and camera sensor sizes to be estimated. At f16 I should get about a 5mm depth-of-field. At f14 I should get about 4.5mm. This means that taking a photo head-on of a 7mm ant at most 4 to 5 mm of the subject will be in sharp focus. Focusing at such close distances is tricky, so one often gets a situation where sharp focus begins a bit in front of the subject, so one might only get 2 or 3 mm of sharp focus. This explains why one sees lots of side-shots or top-shots of macro subjects. The area of interest all falls within the depth-of-field focal range for these shots.

Mid swing

Mid swing, originally uploaded by imarsman.

I took several shots of Nancy swinging from a vine at St. John's Conservation Area, having fun and reliving childhood memories. She and I both like this shot. She told me not to crop it. On reflection I agree.

Using Flash

Ok, I admit now that flash is useful in macro work. I had been one to poo-poo the use of flash. Perhaps this was doe to having seen too many over-lit photos. The other day out of curiousity I decided to find out what I could get out of the built-in flash for my Nikon D50. By itself, with lens extended all the way I got a shadowed section on about 20% of the photo where the flash could not reach. So, I rigged up a diffuser using a cutout from a vinegar bottle. It diffuses, of course, and also sends the light down where the onboard flash would otherwise be blocked. I've found that it works well to warm up my photos without being harsh. It also to allows me to freeze action and thus get better detail on my macro shots.

There are two funnel spiders in our basement, a male and a female. The male hangs out at the entryway to the funnel and the female hides inside. Nancy saw the male this afternoon and wanted to kill it. Janneke loved it, as did I. Without flash it would have been impossible to photograph in our basement. However, with the flash and diffuser, I took some pictures. At this point Janneke decided she wanted to feed the spider. She found a wood louse and we put it by the lair. That's when we saw the female for the first time, emerging from the funnel web. The male kept his distance and absolutely ignored the food. He obviously only wanted to mate. The female grabbed the louse and quickly retreated with it to the funnel. She also did this with some Milkweed Bugs we gave her too.

Descending

Descending, originally uploaded by imarsman.

Here's an ant going down the other side of an obstacle. Amazing ability to traverse terrain. Looking at this one, you can see that ants are well designed for strength. It's body is rigid and its legs provide great leverage. Just amazing.

Alone

Alone, originally uploaded by imarsman.

One of my best insect photos. This ant was pausing at the crest of a plant branch before beginning her descent. Standing at the crest of a hill and looking over the horizon is something that people can identify with. The sky was overcast when shooting this photo, so glare is reduced, both on the ant and the succulent plant that in sunlight produces lots of points of glare.

Investigating

Investigating, originally uploaded by imarsman.

I like this shot. To get it I lay flat on the ground and had the lens pretty much parallel to the ground. The ant's head is in focus and her antennae are outstretched, indicating, I think, investigation. It's amazing what can be done with six legs, pheromones, and a finely honed neural network. It's also amazing how much one comes to love and respect small creatures that one would tread on for fun as a child. My father stopped me from doing this one day when I was about seven I think. He told me that the ants in the hill I was obliterating were living things and deserved respect. This has stayed with me.

Investigating

Investigating, originally uploaded by imarsman.

Here's one of my recent ant pictures, taken with the new Nikon D50, and just as importantly, a 60mm Micro Nikkor AF lens. I'm sure I will take many more photos, some of which will be better, but I like the action in this one. These ants were congregating around a wilted flower and dead midge. The midge was eventually carried away. All of my ant shots so far, except those taken on a cloudy day, have driven home how useful a polarizing filter would be in reducing glare. So, I ordered one today, a B+W 62mm polarizer. It's a good one, made in Germany. Within limits, my philosophy is to purchase good quality things, spending a bit more to get something that will be more useful in the long run. I applied this philosophy to my polarizer puchase, paying $50 instead of $25 for a multicoated polarizer with brass ring mount rather than an uncoated one with an aluminum mount.

The Mac

I have an IMac now. It's a 20" one with a 250 gig hard drive, 2 gigs of ram, and a nice dual core 64 bit processor. From a hardware point of view I'm very pleased with it. From most points of view I'm pleased with it. Here a a few things that I notice, coming from Linux:

Lack of a unified package management system - Managing core aplications is a breeze. They're represented by litle icons but are really directory structures containing all needed files and resources. Just drag to wherever you want them to run from or run them from where they are by double clicking on them. Managing non-core things like Perl libraries is not so neat and tidy. Perl comes with the system, but CPAN itself does not in and of itself manage uninstalling. The berkley ports system, called macports, not surprisingly, is available. It is very good, but duplicates things like perl. So you are left needing to keep track of what is managed by what. Core compiler and other development stuff is updated by Apple. Java is updated by Apple. Apache 1.3 comes with the system and is integrated nicely into the preferences panel. If you want Apache 2 you can use macports to install, uninstall, update, etc. it. The same pretty much goes for anything else. I find myself being a bit on my toes all the time as I wonder whether or not I'm using the right system. This is about how I feel on Linux installing something from source that is spread all around the place.

Apple's desire to push products - Apple has a nice (I suppose) email, contact, and storage service called .Mac. Want to share contacts between users on the same computer? Use .Mac, family edition (really an ldap service). The same goes for things like common storage for things like photos or video. Each user's resources are kept on their own. Sharing, with all of the permissions issues that go along with that, is a more complicated and freelance activity not spelled out at all by Apple because they would allow you to avoid .Mac or some other server product. I am technically sophisticated enough to figure out how to set permissions up so that such file sharing will work, but this sort of thing should be built in. As far as I can tell, openldap can be installed easily enough using macports, but there is precious little help from Apple in getting the needed schemas set up so that it can work properly as a .Mac address book replacement.

Too many modifier keys - The bloody apple key is cute and all but ends up adding another modifier to keep in mind when trying to figure out how to do something like select a word or a paragraph when coding or composing a document. Makes me thing of the gymnastic requirements of emacs usage. I'm sorry, but although I am sure there are indeed useful things one can use the apple key for, mostly I find it adds a complexity multiplier. Apple is famous and appreciative for a less-is-better approach in its design. The apple key works against this. Perhaps I'm not "apple" enough yet. It was probably more useful to allow pseudo right-clicking back when Apple only had one button mice (because they were more simple, I suppose, but holding down a key when clicking to simulate a right-click seems to me to be cheating).

Beyond these gripes I am impressed with the excellent indexing and searching capabilities built right into most applications, the usefulness of a truly shared address book, the general way that things just work without trying to tell you all the details like a proud dog, the way applications icons bounce helpfully to tell you, for instance, that an IRC or IM message awaits, that a file is downloaded, and the prettyness of it all. The wide screen real estate is a huge luxury. Using the built in remote to trigger the theatre application is fun and useful. Fast user switching means that my wife and daughter get to share the computer easily. The office suite is good and was much cheaper than office. The list of happy points is long. Most of my gripes are those of someone being able to manage things well in a debian-based linux system. If Apple embraced an integrated the macports system I'd be impressed and happy.

Sitemaps protocol no longer just for Google

As Brent might say. Google's sitemaps protocol, mostly just an XML schema to lay out the important bits of your site for web crawlers, is being set up as a more neutral protocol to be used by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. I suppose this is just recognizing the fact that though initiated by Google, the sitemap files can be read by anyone. Collaboration in this is pretty easy and makes for good PR. I am planning a site that will be most fun if it uses lots of dynamically fetched and generated content. Unfortunately, this will make it inscrutable by HTML-parsing search engines. Laying out a site map that points to raw content with as much metadata as possible will make it much easier to reliably ensure that search engines get the most information possible. The key is to allow Google or another advertiser maximum exposure to site data and meta information so that ads can be properly targeted. The issue that remains for me is whether or not Google will frown on sending ads to a black box, i.e. will they trust that my AJAX site when calling in Google ads with given keywords is serving up the same contents as is indexed through my sitemaps file. The irony of a lack of trust in my situation would be that I am planning on using Googles Web Toolkit (GWT) to build my dynamic site.

Here's what Netcraft says about the site:
http://www.sitemaps.org was running GWS on unknown when last queried at 16-Nov-2006 08:56:49 GMT

AJAX and web crawlers/advertising

I've been looking into the topic of how to both have an AJAX/DHTML website using a toolkit like prototype or an interface infrastructure like Google Web Toolkit. It boils down to the fact that if you need to let the web crawlers in you have to give them something non-DHTML/AJAX to consume. This can be done a few ways it seems, including intercepting page requests and directing to different handlers based on who's requesting and having a parallel site, one AJAX and the other plain old HTML. Another option is to limit the AJAX to page elements that make things more convenient and functional for the user; things like hide/show login areas, etc. Again, the point is to have a strategy to let the web crawlers in.

I'm thinking about all of this in the context of setting up a site that needs to be indexed properly by Google in order for Adsense to work properly. I'm leaning toward the route of having an entry point for web crawlers and another one for the application with exactly the same core content visible on both. The web crawler content would be optimized to provide maximum meta data and minimum extraneous bulk. I'm leaning to this solution because I am intruiged by the Google Web Toolkit and its ability to be used to build a content-rich site. Of course, I'd have to get a half-decent development machine to do this as well since the GWT uses a model whereby the application moves from a Java one in development to a JavaScript on at deploy time. The Java/Eclipse/etc. part is pretty resource intensive methinks.

Two bug firsts

Two of my bugs have made their way on bugguide.net as firsts in their category. One is a picture wing fly. I found it on the stump of a recently cut-down tree in our drive.


The other is a sap feeding beetle. This one was on a moon flower in our neighbour's small but wild front yard.

Ladybug takes flight

I've not taken photos of bugs since May, but while camping at Selkirk Provincial Park I got this fluke shot of a ladybug taking flight from my thumb.

A Java vs. Ruby example

Here’s some Java code I borrowed and wrote to extract multi-word tags surrounded by quotes from a string and add them to a list

// Now extract all multi-word keywords delimited by spaces
// but not surrounded by quotes
p = Pattern.compile("\"(.*?)\"\\s*");
m = p.matcher(keywordString);
sb = new StringBuffer();

while (m.find()) {
 // Get previous match and add it to the keywords list
 String kw = m.group();
 if (! "".equals(kw)) {
   kw = kw.trim().replaceAll("\"", "");
   keywords.add(kw);
 }
 // remove the current match from the string
 // and thus from consideration
 m.appendReplacement(sb, "");
}
m.appendTail(sb);
keywordString = sb.toString();

Here’s the Ruby equivalent

keywordString.gsub!(/\\"(.*?)\"\s*\/) {keywords << $1.strip}

It’s not the lines of code (although the Ruby code is 1/3 the size) that I notice so much as the unintuitive Java API. appendReplacement? What’s that? Verbosity does not add clarity to the Java and the lack thereof does not detract from clarity for Ruby.

OpenID

I've been investigating (and testing) OpenID lately. The cause, by the way, would be helped if openid.org's url worked without the www subdomain. Openid is an api that allows a person to claim ownership of a url and through that to claim an identity of sorts. It's not a way to prove that a person controlling a url has a certain name, so it's not an authentication mechanism. What it allows is for identity verification to happen in one place rather than over and over and over again in multiple places. An OpenID url I've gotten is ian.marsman.myopenid.com. With this I can log in to livejournal.com, zoomr.com, and other OpenID-using sites. The benefits for the user include the need to have a single identity verification location that can be used on multiple sites. A web application developer using openid as a login mechanism doesn't need to worry about account registration, which is rather nice.

The business model for providing and managing OpenID accounts does not seem to be that promising if that's all one is providing. The API is public and client and server libraries are available in a number of programming languages. One would need to use account management as a way to gain credibility for an identity management consulting business or add extra services on top of the base account management. claimid.com is doing this (or will be once they're out of beta). They seem to want to offer a way for people to point to various urls about the 'net and say "this is mine or about me". They also offer the ability to register other OpenID urls with their site which can be verified by them (the OpenID api allows for this).

In any case, I've installed and gotten running the Ruby version of OpenID. It's available as a gem, which I can't install easily on my non-root-access account. I've thus put all openid libraries under the lib directory of my rails application. This works pretty well. The sample openid_login generator is found and thus can be installed if one puts it in one's ~/.rails/ directory. openid_login.

One gold rush identity management system I'm not crazy about is i-name. i-names can look like "=ian.marsnan" for a personal i-name or "=@myorg*ian.marsman" for a person at an organization. I'm not crazy about this setup because the going rate to register an iname is twenty bucks US. For this, one gets more control over who you give what personal info to. However, OpenID has the ability to create profiles and choose which profile to give to a site that's requesting permission to access one's identity. i-name is an api designed by rather large organizations. OpenID is more grass roots, although Verisign is on the standards committee. Who knows how things will pan out. Both offer the hope of single sign-on. i-name seems more targetted at uses for businesses like corporate identity management and online banking signon authentication. It's a big topic and I'm starting to wander. At the moment all I want is a way to offload user signup management and give people a way to avoid adding my site as another to keep membership track of.

DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism

A great piece on the risks involved in building knowledge using groups. Essentially, the author seems to be suggesting that the results of consensus is not necessarily genius or deep insight, but rather blandness or at the very least, something lacking in boldness and insight. A great read.

The beauty of the Internet is that it connects people. The value is in the other people. If we start to believe the Internet itself is an entity that has something to say, we're devaluing those people and making ourselves into idiots.

The trick is to allow people to have a say and interact while preserving the individual. The article's not a slam against algorithms or Wikipedia, but rather a call to carefully consider how peoples' individual and collective wisdoms can best be used without wiping each other out.

Potential calendar problem in Java!

Java has a GregorianCalendar class (representing a data's year, month, day, etc.) with a get method that takes an integer argument and returns things like that instance's year as an int value. This means that the value returned will be invalid for year values beyond 2,147,483,647 (the maximum value of a Java int)! I think that's the time in Babylon 5 where humans escaped their physical bodies and left our solar system to avoid the impending explosion of the sun. Seriously, of more concern to me is the pain in the neck date and number parsing and formatting is in Java. Arggh! Things like this bug me:

int remainder = new Double(
Math.IEEEremainder(
  new Double(i).doubleValue(),
  new Double(startMonth).doubleValue())/12
).intValue();

What about Ruby's

 (27 % 12).to_i

If that's syntactic sugar I'll risk the cavities.

Letter to the Discovery Channel

You have an informative article on newly discovered species of assassin spiders from Madagascar. Unfortunately, the person writing the story chose to depict them as bizarre and ugly, with phrases such as "recognized by their peculiarly ugly, stretched-out necks and sword-like fangs" and "venom-loaded fangs, attached to the ends of grotesquely stretched-out jaws". Perhaps the author has a particular dislike of spiders or perhaps he wanted to avoid sounding too "sciency". Whatever the reason, I think that descriptions of well adapted spiders as ugly and bizarre does both the spiders and the intelligence and curiosity of your readers a disservice. Most of those who read the article will most likely be there because they find spiders interesting, not horrific. Besides, from the first image the spiders' jaws, head, and necks look a lot like the beak, head and neck of a pelican or stork. One doesn't hear of the blue heron as "having a grotesquely long beak adapted for stabbing its unsuspecting prey from above with lightning speed". In parting I'll leave you with a link to some images of beautiful, well adapted spiders

Chandler is coming along

The Chandler project, started by Mitch Kapor of Lotus fame, is finally starting to look polished and usable. At the moment, the most polished component is the calendar, which has some beginning ineroperability with the server using CalDav. Previously, there were no screenshots of the application, mostly, I suspect, because it was so ugly. It takes a long time to get the backend for such a data-driven application going and yet more time to get the backend hooked into the front-end. Congrats!

The recent White House wiretap affair and technology

ars technica has a great overview of the probable technology behind the recent non-authorized wiretapping affair. I am not at all a fan of a leader, American, Canadian, or other, feeling that he or she has the authority to eavesdrop on the lives of its citizens with not even minimal oversight. However, that is not what I am most interested in here. The ars technica article outlines an eavesdropping system that essentially samples up to one percent of phone conversations being made at any given time. Knowledge of details such as the country being called is used to home in on the most desirous calls, but the fact remains that an automated system will still come up with a few thousand possible phone lines to monitor every day. The decision as to whether or not a call is of interest is made, at least in part, by looking for keywords in call conversations. So, what we end up with is a surveillance system set up in many ways as a high-tech fishing expedition. The premise for a judicially approved wiretapping system is that wiretaps will be made based on pre-existing evidence. This is at odds with a technology-driven system that uses keyword matching as a large part of its algorithm. No free and fair judicial system would approve wiretapping of its citizens purely on the basis of their having uttered forbidden words while talking on the phone, yet that is what this technology demands. We have a basic conflict here between a technology and its needs and a democracy and its underpinning values and rules. The technology's judgements become our new judgements. Now, instead of being guilty of having done something illegal, we are guilty of having uttered something forbidden. The axis of our system of justice and valuations of freedoms is moving to a new centre of gravity.

The ars technica article points out that for all its technological beauty, the system being pushed is not one likely to notice only criminals. It is very likely that a machine-driven system will end up flagging lots and lots of non-criminals as potential terrorists or drug dealers or whatever. Once flagged by a beaurocracy, especially one that loathes oversight and transparency, one is always suspect. We seem to be swimming farther and farther into dangerous waters with very little thought to the implications of our actions. The love of technology instead of thoughtful human insight is not only an American problem. Perhaps they are the early adopters. Perhaps Canada's spies are even less accountable than ours. Perhaps the US system is more leaky or more transparent. The point is that as long as we undervalue human judgement and insight and the checks and balances that keep us free from tyrrany and overvalue technology, we are at risk.

Update: Josh Marshall comments on this as well

From a technological point of view there's not really much outlandish about this at all. This is just the sort of thing the NSA is in the business of doing overseas. But you can see how this would just be a non-starter for getting a warrant. It is the definition of a fishing expedition.

May I submit that wholesale eavesdropping on people around the world is outlandish, especially if it's done with minimal oversight. The bigger the machine the bigger its appetite and the more likely it will turn on its creators.

Testing Flock Blog editor

Well. Here goes. Downloaded the preview release of the Flock browser and am testing it out. Uses de.licio.us to store bookmarks and hooks into blogging. We'll see how revolutionary it is.

Be-pollened Eastern Carpenter Bee

Latin name: Xylocopa virginica

Bees are busy and difficult to photograph. I did however manage to get get this side profile of an Eastern Carpenter Bee covered with a remarkable amount of pollen.

Phidippus clarus female hiding out on Parsley leaf

Latin name: Phidippus clarus

This little female Phidippus clarus was hiding out in our Parsley. The pose shown here is the typical defensive posture; crouching and ready to strike while maintaining maximal ability to view surroundings.

Green Bottle Fly on Sweet Pea flower

Latin name: Phaenicia sericata

This is the unpleasant part of flies (besides their oftentimes diet of rotting flesh or garbage). The front of their heads looks like the front of a human skull, or at least the nose part.

Jumping spider - Sitticus sp.

Latin name: Sitticus sp.

This teeny Jumping Spider was found by Janneke on the sill of our living room picture window. It was only about 2mm in length, total. I brought it outside to our porch and took some pictures of it. It's amazing that something so small can be so complete and capable.

Red-banded Leafhopper

Latin name: Graphocephala coccinea

These bugs are cute and colourful! I don't know how it's adaptive to be red and blue on a green leaf. Perhaps it's less conspicuous in the spectral range visible by its predators. In any case, they look great to humans. Teeny too (about 7mm).

Green Bottle Fly on paving stone

Latin name: Phaenicia sericata

I am not normally a fan of flies, but yet I keep on taking pictures of Green Bottle Flies. It's the irridescence. Looking at them face-on is not pretty, I think because they have indentations similar to those one might see on a human skull. Of course, the fact that they start out as maggots in rotting flesh can be off-putting. In any case, horrid or not, this fly was grooming himself on the lovely walkway through our garden when I took its photo.

Since she's gotten new grandkids my mother simply refuses to use cool shots like this as her computer wallpaper. Imagine!

Long-jawed Orb Weaver on reeds

Old


New

Latin name: Tetragnatha sp.

I re-edited a shot of a female Long-jawed Orb weaver on some bent reeds to bring out the colour more (I blogged about it before). Now the colour is warmer, reminding me of how things look on moist, overcast days. What a spider!

Platycryptus on windshield

Old (non colour adjusted)


New (colour adjusted)

Latin name: Platycryptus sp.

Last night I used the GIMP to do more clean up an image I'd already posted to Flickr. The challenge was to reduce the visual influence of the blueness of the windshield on which the spider stands. The spider, thankfully, did not have any natural blue colouration, so turning down blue and magenta saturation accomplished this goal quite well. This allowed the subject to become much more visible relative to its background. Secondarily, I found that the Gimp allows one to define white and black reference colours in its colour spectrum selector tool. Doing this had the effect of removing a blue cast on the spider's white hair that I hadn't noticed earlier. It seems the camera's electronics where overwhelmed by the blue background and added the cast. In addition to removing the cast, the black/white baseline choosing made the whole picture more clearly defined.

I'm glad I've discovered the black/white baseline setting capabilities of the GIMP. It should help make my images much more attractive. I'm sure Photoshop does this very very well too. However, it costs $500.

Male Black and Yellow Argiope

Latin name: Argiope aurantia

This male Black and Yellow Argiope was literally hanging around above a female in her web, waiting patiently to mate. The female is visible here as the earth is visible to an orbiting satellite. One can see the male transferring some sperm to his palps. I read that males of this species die at the end of mating to inhibit other males from getting at the female. After resting for about twenty minutes the female will pick the male off and eat him, but but that time it's too late for other males.

Wolf Spider lateral view

Latin name: Hogna frondicola

This Wolf Spider was wandering about on the large stone I used as a background for the grasshopper photos I took. As with the grasshopper, I used a polarizing filter on shots of this spider. This spider had a total length of about 9mm.