Tag Archives: photography

Exotic Beauty

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Early in my career, I felt pretty strongly that only native plants should be in the prairies I managed.  Pretty quickly, I realized I didn’t have enough time to eradicate the worst invasive plants from our sites, let alone worry about some of the more innocuous non-native plants.  In fact, I found some of those non-native plants could be pretty valuable (e.g., dandelions and their early season resources for pollinators).

I began to take a much more pragmatic approach to managing plant communities, working to suppress species that tended to form monocultures or become dominant enough to suppress the diversity of plant communities.  Some of those dominant/aggressive species included non-native invasive grasses and woody plants, but also some native species such as big bluestem, eastern redcedar, smooth sumac, and rough-leaved dogwood.  A plant’s status as native or not became less important than how it affected the diversity and function of the plant community it was part of.

A goatsbeard flower opening at sunrise.  Niobrara Valley Preserve.

One non-native plant I’ve always gotten along with pretty well is goatsbeard, aka western salsify (Tragopogon dubius).  Sure, it wasn’t here before European settlement, but it isn’t aggressive and has simply added itself to the plant diversity of many of our prairies.  Also, it’s really pretty (though so are many nasty invasive plants).  Both when it flowers and when it goes to seed, goatsbeard makes an attractive photography subject.

It’s fun to stick a macro lens into a goatsbeard seedhead, which resembles a fist-sized dandelion head, and try to create interesting abstract images.  Goatsbeard seedheads were one of my favorite subjects when I first started playing with close-up photography about 25 years ago, and they still attract me today.  I never get tired of looking at those big fuzzy parachute-style appendages attached to the seeds.

Becoming less of a snob about the native status of plants has made my life a little less stressful.  There are plenty of plant species that require serious attention in order to maintain healthy, diverse, and resilient prairies.  Worrying about whether a plant was here 200 years ago is the least of my worries.  Now when I walk around a grassland, I’m comfortable greeting species like dandelions, goatsbeard, and lamb’s quarters as friends (while still trying to eliminate problematic non-natives such as crown vetch, Siberian elm, and Canada thistle).

2017 Field Days! (And a Photo Question)

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Mark your calendars if you’re interested in attending either or both of our Platte River Prairies Field Days this summer.  The first will be on Thursday July 6, and will be focused on plant identification.  We’ll have several instructors on hand to lead field-based plant identification sessions in various habitats, including upland sand prairie, mesic prairie, and wetlands.  The second field day will be August 5, and will feature a wide range of topics covering prairie ecology, restoration, and management, pollinators and other invertebrates, and more.  Both days are free and open to the all ages.  Look for more details as the time grows near.

Now, a (minor) technical photo quandry I’m hoping you can help me with…

When photographing small flowers and insects, depth-of-field (the depth of an image that is in focus) is a challenge.  At close range, a camera can only bring into focus a narrow range of the image (front to back).  Deciding what needs to be in focus and what can be a little fuzzy is a constant issue, and I often try taking the image a few different ways so I can decide which I like best later.  When I’m photographing a small creature, I almost always make sure the eyes are in focus, regardless of everything else, because as viewers, our eyes are always drawn to the eyes of other creatures.

The eyes of this Woodhouse’s toad are both sharply in focus, but the tip of her nose/snout is a little out of focus – but not enough to be distracting.

When photographing the toad above, for example, I made sure the eyes were sharply in focus, even though i knew that would mean that the part of the toad closest to the camera (the center of its mouth) would appear slightly out of focus.  Because the toad was relatively large, the out-of-focus part was only a little soft and not at all distracting, making it an easy decision to prioritize the eyes being sharp.

Bee Photo #1

The other day, I was photographing a cute little green bee (Agapostemon sp.) on a dandelion flower.  I took quite a few photos, playing with the depth-of-field.  When editing the images later, I came up with two I really liked, but neither had the entire face of the bee in focus.  In the first photo (above), the front green portion of the head was in focus, along with much of the antennae, but eyes were a little soft.  In the second photo (below), the eyes are in focus, but more of the parts of the bee closer to the camera are not.  The second photo shows off the tongue and mandibles a little better, as well as the three simple eyes on the top of the bee’s head.

Bee Photo #2

Below, you can see cropped versions of both photos and compare them.  Again, the one on the left has the green part of the head in focus, while (all 5 of) the eyes are more sharp in the photo to the right.  If I follow my typical rule, I should like the second image better, but I’m not sure I agree with that in this case.  My question for you is this: as the viewer, what is the focal point in the photo?  The big compound eyes?  The point where the antennae meet the head?  Something else?   That focal point needs to be sharp, regardless of whatever silly rule I usually follow.

Here is a side by side comparison.

Ok, I know this is kind of splitting hairs, and the difference between these two photos is pretty slight, but I’ve had other situations in which the decision about whether to focus on a little critter’s eyes or another part of its face is more difficult.  I’m hoping to find out whether what I see as the focal point of these bee images is the same as what others see.  That will help me make future decisions with other images.

Thanks for your help.