CUCUMBER SPIDER

Found this Cucumber green spider (Araniella cucurbitina or Araniella opisthographa, you need a microscope to see the difference) in an ambush in one of our daisys. At least I think this is the correct name. It was sitting on the inside of a net which was spanning accross the flower. What I like with shooting spiders are that they are very patient models. Very patient. This one also have hairy legs, but I think the nice colors makes it more pretty than the cross-spider. Not as pretty as the butterflies I've been chasing around here, but they on the other hand have no patience at all!

BUTTERFLIES, WHAT A STRANGE NAME!

Such beautiful and fragile creatures deserves a beautiful name: fjärill (Swedish), papillon (French), perhonen (Finish), mariposa (Spanish), farfalla (Italian), schmetterling (German) ... the most beautiful I know of is the Danish sommerfugl (Summer-bird). But what about English? Butterfly? Flies are not on the same map in my opinion...more uggly than beauty...and I've never seen any summerfugl eat butter! But this blog is in English, so I will have to do with butterfly.

I've always admired the photographers who are able to produce artistic pictures of flying bugs, not only documenting the specie etc. It is hard enough to catch them in the finder, more so to get them inside the DOF, then you need to think about where the DOF start and end and what more that is inside it, what is behind the DOF in the bokeh, to think about composition, when the bug is flying here and there. Luckily many of them are preoccupied by some flowers or similar, which helps, but it's not easy. It appears to me, with my limited experience, that the most difficult bugs to shoot flying is dragonflies and their different cousins. Ohh, so nervous, manoeuvring like helicopters on steroids. Second position is occupied by butterflies. Even more nervous than the dragonflies, not so good on aeronautics, flying like if they were affected by Brownian diffusion. Worked with the laptop in our garden today, and on the nearby daises several butterflies landed repeatedly, but each time I stood up and reached for the camera, they left like frightened rabbits...

...but a while ago I cheated...
Butterfly wings have two sides that may look very different.

Not so bad...

Quite OK...

I know, far too busy background, but there were no alternaitve...or were there?

Dam grass straw!

How did I cheat? I went to the Butterfly-house in the Haga park in Stockholm with my kids and my mother. After an hour in the heat and high humidity, we were soaked and the SD card was full. Those butterflies are much bigger than the local wild species and they are so used to tourists that they doesn't care that very much about me and my lens.

FUN WITH DFA 100mm macro AND A TUBE - GREATER THAN 1:1 MACRO - OR A LADY WITH HAIRY LEGS

I'm often amazed by macro photo's taken by some photographers. What appears most difficult to me is not the technical side: how to get the picture sharp enough, bright enough, with enough DOF etc, but the estetical side: how do you compose a photo in macro, how do you remember to select the background to get a good bokeh, when you are trying to track a non-cooperative bug?

I make my own humble attempts, mostly for the fun of it. Since our Swedish bugs are often not as large and nor as colorfull as many of those that that I've seen from for example the tropics, it will take some trick to impress with them. So what about macro greater than 1:1? That would give me a chance to both test the limits of the SMC Pentax-D-FA 100mm f2.8 macro lens and the new screwdrive/SDM autofocus tube that I've made out of a 2x converter.

Firstly, below are two shots of flowers from our garden, one of them some white Narcissus. These shots are taken at about 1:2 ratio. Then follows a single picture of a spider shot at near 1:1 using the built in flash. The real spider was not more than about 5mm in this position, legs included. Then I mounted the autofcous tube I've made out of an old Kenko 2x converter. It has both screwdrive gear and SDM contacts. With the DFA100mm macro it will of course focus using the screwdrive. Or will it? I had not tested it before. So it was interresting to see if it would allow autofocus to work on the lens. The tube is about 25mm. I think that results in a 100mm ~f4.2 lens with a maximum reproduction ratio of 2:1 (twice the real size).

And it did focus...most of the time. It worked best to set the camera on using just the center AF point. When focusing on a small spider in a net, it is not hard to understand that the camera might get confused when the spider is some 20cm away and the background behind the web was about 1-2 meter away. That caused some hunting, but as the web was moving in the wind (the spider sat thre calmly without being impressed by me or the camera), I was happy to have the AF.

Pictures turned out quite good with my standards. Below are two examples that turned out both in focus, OK exposed, and with a calm background with ok Bokeh. Handheld, a tripod would not have worked since the web was moving back and forth as much as 5cm in the wind, built in flash, 800 ISO, no cropping, only some minor changes in lightroom. It does look like a real monster, doesn't it? At 2:1 it cover about 50% of the width of the sensor, and does not have to stand back to any decimeter sized tropical spider, despite its mediocre 5mm in real size. As far as I can judge, this is a European garden spider (Araneus diadematus) aka diadem spider aka cross spider (korsspindel in Swedish), a female. A lady with hairy legs ;)

The flash caused some reflections in the web, but the lens combo appeared to be quite flare resistant. The first picture above is the only one with massive flare, but in this case it is almost a special effect. Finally, I took a walk around the garden to see if I could find some more motives, but the bugs were hiding. Except in the plum tree, where I was surprised to find that there were sitting an ant in almost every flower. I did not know that ants were eating pollen?!

MORE SPRING (THROUGH THE SMC PENTAX-A*135mm f1.8)

The spring is advancing more every day. Now all trees except the realy old ones have leaves, and more and more flowers for every day. Still very few butterflies.

Took out my most valuable glass one morning this week, the legendary SMC Pentax-A* 135mm f1.8, to try it out with a dedicated SMC Pentax-A 2x-S converter. What can an excellent lens with a very good converter do. Usually converters are dissapoing since the result is always a step worse than the worst component, weather this is the lens or the converter. So a mediocre converter on a mediocre lens is really bad, and a good converter on a good lens is only mediocre. But what does excellent and very good combine into?

First I shot some Lilac flowers, plum and apple blossoms playing with the thin DOF testing the bokeh. Contrast came out better than with any converter+lens combo I have ever tried and the bokeh was usually smoth as well. Only on one of the Lilac shots did I get a bit of aperture blade reflexes. The resulting lens almost gives me a 300mm f3.5 (almost), which I belive is also by far a better option for birds than my old Tokina 400mm, even if I have to do some cropping.

I got some decent shots on a black bird while it was eating earth worms. Jummy! But his shy wife watched me with suspicion in her eyes from the bushes, and the curious tree sparrow (antenna sparrow?) watched us from the neighbours roof. These birds we have in the gardens in Sweden are not that colorfull and exotic, but they are fun to watch just for their behaviour.

FINALLY SPRING!

We spent a fantastic weekend with my parents in law. Down there in south-western Sweden spring had come a bit further than here in Stockholm. Many trees, especially the birches, had just got tiny little leafes that were shining in a light green color. While driving down I realised that it gives the landscape a character similar to that in the autumn when the leafes go yellow. The contrast between the coniferous and deciduous portions of the forest are larger than in the middle of the summar season.

One of the days we took a hike to a lake nearby. It is actually an artificial lake created to get a drinking water storage for the area, and it is called "Storsjön", which translated to "great lake", not to be confused with the bigger namesake in norther Sweden. Despite being artificial, it is a nice hiking area with mixed forest on the beaches , some cliffs and a few islands. Good canoeing area.
After a good lunch, while the kids were playng in the water, I rested on the blanket we braught, looking up into the canopy of fresh yellow-green leafes ahead of me against a brilliantly blue sky I realised that this made a nice motive and got the camera.

All pictures are taken with the SMC Pentax-DA 35mm f2.8 macro ltd lens on the K20D, except for one taken with the SMC Pentax-DA 10-17mm fisheye, and the wood anemone that was taken with the Tamron adaptal 2 SP 90mm f2.5 on the 2x convereter (making it a 180mm f5 1:1 macro lens). For the anemone I also used the AF240Z flash on a macro flash adapter.

HOW THE WINTER STARTED 08/09

This winter has in many ways been a dissapointment as a winter. Some first snow came in November, but melted away after a week. My kids were dissapointed.

It started so well that week in November when we got some 20-30cm snow in two days.
Since I suspected it would not last I braught the camera downtown when running som errand (K20D with FA50/1.4). Snow flakes falling in light often makes an interresting motive.

City square became a dumping place for the snow from nearby roads, and it did not take long before kids were enjoying the unexpected snow mountain. However, when we did approach christmas, the same square looked like it always does when it was used as a market place for x-mas trees.

WHY MY DIGITAL PENTAX BODIES DOES NOT FIT IN MY WINTER COAT POCKET

What's this?

Well, it is a summary of the development since the first Pentax K-mount camera to the current digital SLR K-mount bodies from Pentax. My purpose is to show how the size of the camera bodies have changed with the technical development. In many ways the depth is the most important factor for where you can fit a camera (in which pocket). If you follow the time line you will see how the initial bulky analog K series bodies (that was basically Spotmatic cameras with a K-mount instead of the m42 thread) are replaced by the minimized M serie and A serie models. Then the size begins to increase with the introduction of built-in winder and auto focus. Pentax tried to turn the trend with the MZ series which mimic the old attempts to minimize the size of the M serie bodies, with the MZ-M being the last really small body (and the last with manual focus). Then came the digital era and since the electronics of the picture sensors are thicker than film, the size increased again, though Pentax has successfully tried to make the *istD serie bodies and the K-m among the smallest digital SLRs on the market. But despite this, the bodies have on average got much more bulky (~50%) than they were 30 years ago. So they don't fit in my coat pocket :(

Worth notice is that the respectively top models, (semi)professional or advanced amateur, of most body families: K2, Z-1 and Z-1p, *istD, K20D are larger than the rest of their families. The exceptions are the LX and MZ-S.


Next diagram shows camera body weight instead of body depth. If you follow the time line you will see how the initial heavy analog K series bodies were replaced with the M serie models. Then the size begun to increase with the introduction of more electronics and built-in winder and auto focus. Pentax turned the trend with the MZ series where minimized size and plastic materials replacing metal resulted in the lightest 35mm Pentax SLR bodies ever. Then came the digital era. While it is clear to me that the bodies must get thicker because the electronics of the picture sensors are thicker than film, I don't really understand why the digital bodies have to get heavier. But they did, despite all plastic. Must be all electronics and the fact that the Pentax DSLRs appear better built than the 90's SLR bodies, despite similar amount of plastics. The weight increased despite that Pentax have tried to keep the *istD serie bodies and the K-m compact. Despite all plastics that have replaced all the metal in the K, M and A bodies, we are back were we started: the K20D is about the same weight as the K2 was (top model of the K serie), and the K-m is only slightly lighter than the KM was 30 years ago.

I have not put trends for length and hight into graphs, but they are partly linked to the same factors as seen in these two figures, with some additional effects. The length takes a jump from 130-140mm to 150-160mm with the introduction of the built in winders, which Pentax manage to compensate for in the MZ familly. With the introduction of digital SLRs, the size of the smaller bodies scrink to 120mm or below because there is no need any longer to make room for a film casset to the left side of the camer (seen from behind), while the bigger models remain around 140mm, probably using the space for all the electronics needed in the upper end bodies. With the exception of the initial K familly and the LX (with the standard seaker, it is interchangeable), all early cameras are less than 90mm in height. Then with the intriduction of the built in flash from the SF serie and beyond, the height takes a jump above 90mm (*ist being the only exception). The current top model K20D and the previous K10D is above 100mm high. Not only does the built in flash add about 10mm, but the flash-prisma combo is often much bulkier in all directions than it used to be, which is very noticeable when I try to squeze even the *istDS into my pocket.

I bet that most camera brands (those of the original players that have survived) will show similar trends if you do the work to collect the data graphically, though some will be bulkier on average than the Pentax cameras. Olympus is likely the other manufacturer that will challenge Pentax in the smallest and lightest bodies. Canikon will be bigger with some exceptions, but follow a similar trend with the introduction of built-in driver, autofocus and digital image sensors instead of film. Worth remembering is that not all DSLRs would fit in the pocket even if the body is small, because the brand in question may not have small enough lenses...

In summary: They got shorter (some at least), but higher and thicker, and in terms of weight we are back were we started despite less metal in the bodies. They don't fit in my pocket any longer, not even the *istDS. Maybe the K-m will? On the other hand, my MX, Super-A and Program-A easily fit in my pocket with any of several of my lenses, and even the LX and KX can be squeezed down with one of the smallest lenses. So I will keep in having the MX or Super-A there with a 28mm or 50mm lens. While waiting for a thin enough Pentax DSLR!
And don't try to tell me to get a Olympis E-400-something. It is not a K-mount.

Data sources: Pentax own web pages and folders, and the marvelous http://www.bdimitrov.de/
I might have mixed up weight with and without batteries in some cases. These data are not always reported in a systematic way. It will not change the over all conclusions.