September 24, 2022 - Mono means one, pod means pod - and, u l t r a w i d e

contextualized

Most of the work I do is documenting what I have called fiddly little things, which involves a lot of flowers and insects. One would think this would be work that leads itself to a lot of macro lens time, and you wouldn't be wrong if you found yourself in that camp thinking about me... but I also spend quite a bit of time doing this with wide angle glass. When I first started using 'real' cameras in 2003, I had exactly two lenses: an smc-Pentax M 135mm and an smc-Pentax K 24mm. Lens designs contemporary to the 1970s appear to have assumed nobody would ever try to take close-up photos with a lens that was not specified for the purpose, so the 135 does not get terribly close to anything. That's great for things like rabbits, but for flowers, a theoretical 1:9 maximum reproduction ratio isn't very inspiring. The 24mm focusing at a quarter meter does a couple of things: first, a nominally tighter 1:7-ish ratio does actually make objects larger on film, and second, the photographer being actually closer to the object makes it feel... well, closer. I spent a lot of time 'misusing' that ultrawide lens, and so I developed a fondness for my own accidental style, one of context surrounding an object. The lead image on this post is such an example... it's not going to light the world on fire as an artistic accomplishment, but we get detail on the flower and we get a lot of background showing where it grows.

This specific example is on a point of land into Pine Lake in Wheaton Regional Park in Maryland that often gets used as a fishing point. These little asteraceae blooms were waiting to greet anyone that bothered to wander off into the woods to watch the small group of ducks and geese on the water. I used my 14mm (APS-C) to do this capture, a lens I absolutely adore using, and one that I wish would get a reissue with more aperture blades and weather sealing.

This photo is through the 21mm (APS-C). While not an ultrawide field of view, it's still very much in the genre of "look at the wonderful world around the thing you're photographing." With these anenome flowers being so delicate and pale, exposing for them tends to produce a beatiful vibrant blue sky on clear days like this one. 

I think this is the star image of these three, though. Milkweed bugs patrolling a seed pod made for a great foreground with the structure of the plant visible in the back. The only thing I wish I had been able to frame up a little better would be fully-open flowers, as none of the buds on the foreground sprig had gotten to the point the flowerhead just beginning at bottom center at that point. One of the things you have to accept doing this kind of photography, though, is that it is nature and therefore subject to the sense of order of things that respond on a seasonal timescale. I can't make a flower bloom, and don't want to try.

That said, I never will just go out with a set of ultrawides. I do have to carry a macro lens with me, and this walk was one of my first with a monopod.

Using a 100mm macro and on-camera flash, I was able to stabilize enough to catch this moth napping on what looks to me to be goldenrod. This photo also managed to do something that's relatively hard to do by accident with flash-macro work and shows background detail, not just a dark rectangle. Macro with context is really difficult to do like that unless you're kind of intentional about making sure the background exposure is going to be within the same couple of stops as the subject.

Or you can just shoot bugs in a flower. This species of hibiscus is almost always good for finding something lunching inside, and this day it was a little bumblebee and a honeybee. This image also did something I always love finding out in processing when I get home though...

It contained bonus bugs! I do think this might be a parasitic fly that was tending to the honeybee, but regardless, there's a whole world of little things going on even beyond the little things I can see and decide to act on. I also love the fact that the added detail of the pollen stuck to the bee really shows how pollination works.