Trendy Photography: I'm Apparently Doing It Right

So a few photography blogs I've been reading have been talking about bokeh.

Bokeh is defined by Wikipedia as: In photography, bokeh is the blur, or the aesthetic quality of the blur, in out-of-focus areas of an image, or "the way the lens renders out-of-focus points of light."  Differences in lens aberrations and aperture shape cause some lens designs to blur the image in a way that is pleasing to the eye, while others produce blurring that is unpleasant or distracting— "good" or "bad" bokeh, respectively.

Basically, it's the idea that you use the blur to bring out the focal point of your pictures (with greater or lesser amounts of success).  Here are a few of my better bokeh pictures...

Floating Sunspot

What I absolutely love about this one is that the bokeh creates the effect that the flower is just floating in space.  There is a stem... but you can't see it! 

Turaco, Busy Building

 This is a White Crested Turaco from the free-flight section of Brookfield Zoo.

Little Bug Makes an Exit

In this one, not only is the background blurred, the edges of the petals on the left are too, drawing your eye to the center of the flower and the bug crawling out of it.

Grasshopper, Stick-Clinger

 This little grasshopper was ridiculously easy to lose in the grass, so without the background being obscured, it would be hard to see what I was trying to capture.  This is from a photography trip I took last fall with a friend.  We were heading back to the car from one of our stops when I saw this guy bounding around the grassy area between where we'd parked and the highway.  I made her wait fifteen minutes while I chased him around until he was still enough for me to get a good shot!

Mr. Fokker Poppy Faces the Sun

 This one is interesting because it's the blurry flowers in the background that give this photo some needed color to keep it from being too monochromatic.

12-Spotted Rester

 This one is more typical of what you see in the 'text-book' examples of bokeh, where the background bits become little circles of light.  Personally I wish I could get more of my shots to do this.  I often get just really harsh glare off the water.

Itty-Bitty Flower Committee

 This is a little curl of flowers that took me forever to capture properly.  Believe it or not, the whole cluster is about the size of a nickel.  When you're shooting with a macro lens, you can be pretty sure your background will be quite blurred.  This can be good when you're trying to isolate something like this, but less helpful in settings where you want to capture everything.

Shiny Red Wings

 This guy is from one of my recent Midewin posts.  The beetle is in sharp focus, as is the leaf he's on, but the rest of the plant, and the plants behind him are almost nonexistent.  Because of all the soft greens, his red shell really pops.

Halloween Pennant in August

Dragonflies like this are pretty well camouflaged, so if the background were to stay as busy as it really was, the dragonfly wouldn't be nearly as visible or clear.

Midewin - 8.15.10, Post 3 (last post for this trip)

Last batch from Midewin, which, if you're curious, is pronounced mih-DAY-win.  I didn't know that until the emergency guy called me back and said it out loud.

Another swallowtail (who's missing a bit of her right wing 'tail'.)  This is the underside of her wings.  It's nice that on this particular species the underside and the topside are pretty similar.  It makes identifying them much easier.  Some species are so different when their wings are up than when their wings are down and most identification pages only show wings-down, so you're hoping and guessing as you try to assign a name to a critter. [Under the Swallowtail]

I love this shot.  You have a great view of the body and the colors on the wings.  You can see her antennae and her feet.

[Swallowtail in Profile]

These Pearl Crescents were out in droves and I loved how they seemed keen on doing that iconic 'butterfly on a flower' thing.

[Feeding Time for Pearl]

This ended up being lit poorly and not as in focus as I'd hoped, but I just love the composition.  This little Pearl Crescent wanted so badly to become one with his flower!

[Becoming One with the Flower]

This poor guy actually has a species name of "Little Yellow Butterfly."  No, really, that's what it's called.  What's really hard to see in this shot unless you blow it up, is that he's sitting there, wings open, basking in the sun, and holding court with a bunch of the little purple butterflies, which I think are Acadian Hairstreaks.  The easiest one to see is in the lower right corner, but they do a pretty good job of blending in and looking like a piece of rock.
[Little Yellow Butterfly Holds Court]

Wild Morning Glories.  I love finding flowers that people plant "on purpose" out in the wild.

[Wild Morning Glories]

Pearl Crescent in the mud and sticks.  Beautiful butterfly in a less than beautiful background.  I like the contradiction.

[Pearl in the Rough]

Little tiny grasshopper!  I believe it's a Red-Legged Grasshopper, but at some point I'll need to research this guy a little more.

[Grasshopper Faces Obstacle]

I cannot find a species name for this beetle.  Anyone?  I like the look of him isolated on the leaf with the blurred background.

 [Shiny Red Wings]

 This huge bush of Black Eyed Susans was found... in the parking lot of one of the sections I didn't explore.  (I went over there, started to sign in and look for the trail, but I was already hot and tired, it was already 5:00 and the insects were so thick that I hung it up.)

[Serious Bunch of Black-Eyed Susans]

Midewin - 8.15.10, Post 2

I found this sign kind of interesting. Blow it up and read it if you can, but the short version is "There may be archeological and anthropological stuff on these grounds. Don't touch 'em."

Um... this used to be a MUNITIONS plant storage site. A.) If those are the A&A artifacts, I wouldn't want to touch them anyway. B.) If they aren't - if there's actual Native American or even colonial American stuff there - I'm really, really, really surprised the Army didn't deal with it when this was their land and I'm not sure I want it. I didn't see anything old and interesting.

A Carolina Grasshopper (Carolina Locust). These things are pretty huge for bugs. Maybe three inches long? And they fly as much as hop. When they do their wings give them a vaguely butterfly-ish appearance which kind of freaked me out when they landed in front of me and *weren't* butterflies. They also look like pieces of wood lying on the path, until you step near them. Then they jump up and fly in your face, which is rather shocking.

[Carolina in Central Illinois]

I'm pretty sure this is a Silver-Spotted Skipper. A type of butterfly I hadn't seen before.

[Silver-Spotted Skipper Sips]

So yesterday I posted a little about the butterfly watering hole. This is a piece of one shot, where you can see how thick the butterflies got over there.

[Crowd of Cloudeds]

Okay, this shot is *lousy*, even this small, but it's a red-tailed hawk. I saw several circling around the meadow.

I *think* this is a Citrine-Tail Damselfly. I know it's not the sharpest shot ever, but it's a very small critter - too small to be a dragonfly. And the only all yellow-tail damselfly I can find online is the Citrine-Tail. If anyone has any better ideas, I'd love to hear them.

[Vibrating Citrine-Tail]

I believe this is a Pearl Crescent. I love in this shot how he seems to be sitting on the tip of the shadow the same way butterflies sit on the tops of flowers and grasses. These are teeny tiny guys - about 1 or 1.5 inches across.

[Perched on the Edge of a Shadow]

A White-Faced Meadowhawk. Probably one of the calmest dragonflies ever. This guy was pretty far back from the path so he was harder to shoot than I would have liked. In some ways it was good that I didn't schlep my tripod, but it would have made this shot much better.
[White-Faced Watcher]

Two Dogbane Leaf Beetles. Gotta love the internet, because seriously, who learns about "Dogbane Leaf Beetles" in school and can identify them like you can, "Oh, that's an ant/bee/fly." I think we need to change the old expression to "The birds and the bees and the beetles" if you know what I mean. ;)

[Beetles: Like the Birds and the Bees]






Okay, that's ten. More later. :)

Midewin - 8.15.10, Post 1

This was so very clearly not the world's most thought out trip ever.
The Chicago weather had, theoretically, broken.  We were out of the 90's and into the lower 80's... or so the weatherman said.  So I wanted to get out and shoot.  And I wanted to get out of the city.

I did a little Google roulette and decided to try the Midewin National Tallgrass Preserve.  It's in Willmington, IL, just south of Joliet, an area I was familiar with since I used to live down there about 10 years ago.

Long story short, during World War II, Korea and Vietnam the military had a munitions manufacturing plant in this area.  They made TNT, bombs, shells, the whole nine yards.  In 1970 they shut down the plant.  It took them 25 years to clean the land of the contaminants and in 1995 the land became the property of the National Forest Preserve and it was turned back into a proper Illinois prairie.

It's a very, very large prairie with several different distinct ecosystems - savannah, woodlands, wetlands, etc...  And you need to drive from one to get to another.  It's very, very big.

Anyway...

Problem The First:  My cursory glance of the website did not reveal that the welcome center is not open at all on Sundays.  Guess when I went.  Of course.  But there was this nice little literature holder with a map of the park and some phone numbers.  I see one that says "After Hours" and call it to see if I can still hike even if the welcome center is closed and to see if there's a place to park, since the gate to the main parking lot was locked.  I called and got a machine.  I hung up, figuring that there was no one there.

So as I continue looking over the info I notice that it actually says, "Emergency and After Hours".  Oops.  I've hung up on an emergency number.  I really do know better than that.  So someone called back to make sure everything was okay and I apologized for being stupid and he told me that I could still hike and where I could park.  He was very nice in the face my huge Oops.

Problem The Second: The weatherman lied.  Hugely.  When I got back to my car after my hike it said it was 92 degrees.  I'd gone through all the water and Gatoraid in my bag and eaten all my pickles (I like to pack pickles with my lunch - they add water and salt :) by the time I got back.  Good thing I keep a gallon of drinking water in my car in the summer!  This is not the kind of place where you can just nip over to the nearest 7-11 and grab something.  There's a porta-potty in the parking lot.  That's the only 'convenience' outside of the (closed) welcome center.  In fact, you're so far out that each trailhead has sign in book so people will know you're out there.  In my 8 hours out there, I saw one couple on horseback and one guy on a bike.  That was it for the day.  (On the flip side, I did have a cell phone signal the whole time (except for IN the bunker) so I wasn't too freaked out about being in the great unknowns on my own.

Problem The Third: After having survived almost 38 years without ever getting a tick in my life, I saw the "Tick Area" signs and went, "Okay, note to self, brush off bugs."  And then continued to hike around in my shorts and t-shirt.  Yeah, I was all the way home when I realized I had a tick in the middle of my right calf.  I didn't feel a thing, so it's a very good thing that this little monster was somewhere where it was easily seen.  Anyway, this thing caused huge amounts of drama.  I called the E.R. and said, "I have a tick, I can't get it out."  They had me call my doctor, who of course, wasn't in on 6:30 at night on a Sunday.  So her service called her, she called me and the long and the short of it was I had to go to the E.R. to have it removed.

I hate anything that goes through my skin.  Needles, pins, BUGS!  So this thing had me pretty freaked out.  The nurse was great though and got it out completely painlessly.

But here's the part that sucks.  I'm on antibiotics for two weeks to make sure I don't get Lyme Disease.  I've read enough on Lyme Disease to know that I never, ever want to get it.  But wow, these drugs are no picnic either.  Both the E.R. doc and my doc insist that this one is the best one for the job, but my body really hates it.

So, you know... if you see Tick Area signs, take them very, very seriously.  Wear long sleeves and long pants, tuck your pants into your socks, the whole nine yards.

I have never been so grateful that I wear a bandana over my head almost every time I shoot.  I really don't want to think about one of those little blood-suckers being lost in my hair where I wouldn't be able to see it.

Problem the Fourth: If I did want to go back, it would be further into the fall, when it's cooler and the flora will have changed. Unfortunately, Midewin is also a hunting ground.  In the fall it's apparently deer season (Spring is turkey season - that said I didn't see one turkey or deer all day).  A.) I don't want to see people hunting deer.  I certainly don't want to see them succeed.  B.) I'm sure the park has it sorted, but I'm not entirely sure that I want to be hiking in the general vicinity of people shooting guns.

So!  Anyway, I spent the day out there doing a five mile trip around the Bunker Group 63 Loop.

While the munitions plant is gone, and obviously, so is anything that might blow up, the storage bunkers are still there.  Row after row after row of these things.

Throughout the grounds there are a few open ones.  They have signs on them that they can be used as inclement weather shelters.  I used one as a place to stop and eat lunch. :)  They aren't ridiculously huge, but they are smooth concrete.  The echoes in these things was amazing.  Just unzipping my bag made enough noise to echo for five or six seconds.

 Unless you're a huge insect fan, this place - at least the section I explored - was kind of a wash.  Lots and lots and lots of bugs (I got attacked by a swarm of - wait for it - butterflies!)  But other than the cows used to maintain the prairie (and kept behind barbed-wire away from the hiking paths), I didn't see a mammal all day.  But like I said, there was an insane number of insects.  Here's a little red ant on a Queen Anne's Lace.

[Ant's Anne Lace]

 Here's a bee on a milkweed plant.  I like how you can see, so clearly, the stripes on his abdomen.

[Milkweed Bee]

 The place is butterfly central.  If you want a place to catch 'flutterbies' in their natural environment, this totally is your place.  I this case a female black swallowtail feeds from a bull thistle.

[Floating Female Swallowtail]

 The prairie was pretty dry, so where there were ruts in the road, water tended to collect.  Around these little watering holes would be hundreds of butterflies.  These are Clouded Yellows.  With their wings open, they were maybe two inches tip to tip.  Very tiny.  And there were huge flocks of them all over the prairie.
[Clouded Yellow Butterflys Get Together for a Drink]

 I'm fairly sure this is an Eastern Tailed Blue Butterfly (though I found that name on a Wisconsin butterflies site - but I don't think Butterflies get caught up in the cheddar curtain or anything, so...).

Anyway, what I love about this shot is that not only is the little 1 inch butterfly a beautiful purple, so is his shadow!

[Me and My Purple Shadow]

 The Buckeye Butterflies were very calm and tended to land in the middle of the paths.


[Basking Buckeye]






Okay, that's post one.  More from this hike tomorrow. :)