Creation is a wonderful place.

Thought for the Day:

Because these men will not accept the only explanation which can fit the facts of their own experience, they have become metaphysical magicians. No one has presented an idea, let alone demonstrated it to be feasible, to explain how the impersonal beginning, plus time, plus chance, can give personality. We are distracted by a flourish of endless words, and lo, personality has appeared out of the hat!

~ Francis A. Schaeffer, The God Who is There

A friend reminded me recently that I, too, am a part of God's wonderful creation. While true, I still find myself to be less interesting than the critters I observe and capture through my camera (disregarding the theological point of having been made in God's image, rendering my self-evaluation null as you, I and any person to ever walk the earth is of more value than any other created thing).

And so, I spend a fair amount of time wading through the undergrowth (enough time, it seems, that my children are learning the names of some of the bugs), searching for bugs of all descriptions, which proclaim the creativity of our God, simply by being. Sometimes I even remember that the grass, trees and flowers also proclaim His creative power, and so I sometimes capture some of these also.

One of the downsides of shooting macro is light fall off. For those who don't know what this is, I'll try give a simple explanation: You are looking at a tiny, tiny piece of the earth. Even in broad daylight, this means excluding 99.999999999% of your surroundings, and therefore also excluding the abundance of light that is not hitting your subject. The further you magnify your subject, the more light you lose. Then there is the point of aperture, and finding a balance between Depth of Field, Light and Sharpness. Often, there is not enough light to shoot without a flash.

So, we rig up flashes and cables and macro flash mounts and DIY diffusers, and set off to capture what we can. The problem is that if the light has nothing to bounce off and return into the lens, that portion of the photo will be black. And that distance is fairly small - we're talking around about 300mm when operating at Minimum Focus Distance. So, there are three options: Have black backgrounds, don't take photos where there will be a black background, or "fake" a background. The first two are easily done - it doesn't look bad having a black background, and it is simple to not take photos (although that would defeat the purpose of being out there with your camera at all) - but the third is slightly trickier. You can try to rest your background on something, but what if there is nothing on which to rest it? You can put it on a tripod, but what if your subject takes off? In some cases, you can end up holding the background and subject in one hand, while trying to shoot with the other. Mass deletion of missed shots follows.

But some work. Some work out quite well.

And, I found a Frog.