Cabbage White on Thistle

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A cabbage white butterfly with a lovely streak of yellow on its wing.

Today we take a look at some views of a cabbage white butterfly on thistle. The subject makes for a fairly soft palette of colors with little bits of bolder color thrown in.

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Facing the camera at an angle the cabbage white hangs on to the thistle.

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I imagine the cabbage white attempting to hunker down and hide in the thistle, though it’s really just an illusion of perspective.

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Look at that long tongue of the cabbage white as it feeds on thistle nectar.

I hope you enjoyed this look at the delicate nature of the cabbage white.

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Lesson Learned with Opteka Fisheye Lens

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This is how an image with this lens should look.

I believe it’s important to admit to our mistakes, that it’s a big part of how we learn and grow. And so this is my time to admit to you what is a slightly embarrassing mistake on my part. It’s the sort of very simple mistake you’d think I’d no longer make. And yet… here we are. 😁

I’d decided to take a single lens, my Opteka 6.5 mm Fisheye lens, out for a hike through the woods and see if I could learn to better see through this focal length and perspective. What’s funny is the entire time I kept thinking something just isn’t right with the photos I’m creating. And yet I didn’t figure out what until we were almost at the end of our hike. That’s when I realized the black bars on the left and right side of EVERY SINGLE photo I created were caused by the incorrectly attached lens hood! I’d spent the entire day shooting with the lens hood on SIDEWAYS, creating these vertical black bars to the left and right of each and every photo. And let me tell you, I felt pretty stupid when I realized what I’d done. But I also had a good laugh about it. These things do happen. They key is learning from them.

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An incorrectly installed lens hood can be seen by the lens. That’s what the black bars are on each side.

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Making the best of a bad situation, I can simply crop the photo into a square format. 😁

This sort of problem is very unlikely to happen with most of the lenses from major manufacturers. They tend to build lens hoods that only snap on in the correct orientation. But this lens was not from a major manufacturer. It was a very low cost fisheye lens, something to let me dabble in fisheye photography without the much larger costs from the big brands. Fisheye photography isn’t something I do often so I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy it enough to warrant the higher cost. But sometimes you do get what you pay for, and opting for lower cost alternatives can come with compromises in quality. In this case it came with a lens hood that can be snapped in place just as easily sideways as it can correctly.

I’ve included some photos to give an idea of what it looks like and why it’s a problem. The 6.5 mm fisheye lens is such a wide angle it can almost see around corners. The camera’s sensor is rectangular and in a horizontal orientation. So the correct way to install the lens hood is with the larger petal shapes on the top and bottom, where the sensor is longer and there’s more space above and below it, and the smaller ones on the sides where the sensor is shorter and closer to the edge of the frame. This will properly provide a (very) small amount of shade and not obstruct the sensor. But putting the lens hood on sideways causes the vertical bars on the left and right and turns the photo into something closer to a square.

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Here’s the lens hood that, frustratingly, can be installed incorrectly just as easily as correctly.

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This shows the lens hood incorrectly attached to the lens. Notice the vertical black bars on the left and right where the wider petals of the lens hood shade the sides of the lens. Because the camera sensor is rectangular and oriented horizontally, these shaded regions will be seen by the sensor and turn into black bars in your photos.

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Here I’ve correctly attached the lens hood, with the larger petals at the top and bottom. Notice the darker bars now create a horizontal rectangular shape that matches the sensor in the camera, so the lens hood doesn’t obstruct anything or appear in the image.

So one of the lessons here might be to better learn your gear, its strengths and weaknesses, and how best to deal with them. And if you have a strange feeling that something just isn’t right maybe put a little extra time into trying to figure out why instead of just continuing on as you are. Maybe you’ll find the incorrectly attached lens hood faster than I did and end up with fewer obstructed photos.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this look at a slightly embarrassing mistake I made. And perhaps it’ll be enough to keep you from making a similar mistake.

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A Scintillating Spider Web

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A scintillating spider web

Light is everything in photography. Without it we wouldn’t have photography. So I watch for changing light and how this affects the scene in front of me. And sometimes I’m amazed by what light and nature create.

My father and I were hiking the Oak Ridge Trail in Prince William Forest Park one morning. As is often the case on these hikes, I wasn’t looking for anything specific to photograph, but instead remaining open to anything we stumbled across. I often travel with just a single lens which limits what I’m able to capture, but that sort of constraint can sometimes be a good thing (as is the lower weight and bulk of my pack!). On this morning I was carrying my 105mm macro lens, so naturally I was drawn to smaller subjects.

One thing that’s hard to overlook during early morning hikes are all the various spider webs (sometimes crossing right over the trail, so watch out!). It really is amazing just how many spiders are out there. We saw so many webs, each different, and from a wide variety of spider species.

Then we rounded a corner and noticed how the light was hitting this one special web, creating such beautiful scintillations, colors and shapes just twinkling and sparkling. It was like looking through one of those old kaleidoscopic tubes, twisting it and watching the colors and shapes swirling and changing.

I quickly pulled up my camera and tried to capture some of this incredible sight. I was hand-holding and it was early enough that this part of the forest was still fairly shaded. Thankfully there wasn’t a lot of wind, so the spider and its web weren’t moving too much, but I still needed to raise the ISO to between 1000 - 1600 to give me a shutter speed of between 1/80 to 1/320 of a second. I have a bit of a shake to my arms so it wasn’t a perfect situation and using a tripod would have been better, but sometimes there’s more benefit to the flexibility of not using a tripod.

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Spider glow

A couple minutes later the scene had completely changed, all because of the shifting light. I continued photographing the same spider, which I believe to be a filmy dome spider. This time, though, the light was enough to light up just the spider, letting all else fade to black, the web almost invisible, the spider appearing to glow. It makes for a very different image, doesn’t it?

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Clinging to the web

About a minute and a half later, and from a slightly different perspective, I created this final image. This time we can see the web, but with a very different look than the first image. In this one it’s far more simple, a multitude of little threads. I liked how you can see where the spider’s legs touch the web and how they sometimes pull on it just a little. Notice how different the spider looks in this light, too. You get a more detailed view of it, helping with identification.

Any light can be good light for photography. You just need to be open to the possibilities and willing to experiment. Always be aware of the light around you. It can shift and change in so many ways as the sun travels across the sky, clouds move in and out, trees sway back and forth. Spend some time in one location and notice how the light can change and how this affects the scene.

It’s a beautiful world out there!

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