Freaky Fly
Roger caught this little freaky dude in our house.
We tossed it into the fridge for a while to calm the fly down.
And then we took it into the garage and let it slowly crawl around a pencil while I snapped some macro shots.
I had the camera settings all wrong, but I still managed to capture a bit of the essence of oddness of this fly.
Even still, the hexagonal grid of black spots on a yellow background of Dude Fly’s Eyes caught me by surprise at full scale in Aperture.
Nature rules. Roger let the fly go. A few minutes on his warm hand in the direct sun outside and Dude Fly was fully back into superfly mode.
Next time?
Tripod.
Make sure the damned ISO is at 100 or 200 (400 is noisy at low light on a Rebel XT). I hate it when I forget to reset it.
Try the make controller + external flash.
Get around to building a light box.
January 2nd, 2008 at 3:38 am
Interestingly, forgetting to reset the ISO setting (which happens regularly to me too) is one of the top mistakes of digital photographers. At least that’s what this Epic Edits post says. Nice fly, though!
January 2nd, 2008 at 9:28 am
Great shots. What a tight DoF window – the focus variations over just a couple mm are really interesting. Would be nice to see hi-res of the eyeball closeup.
January 2nd, 2008 at 9:40 am
That fly has too many dead pixels. I’d return him for a warranty replacement.
January 2nd, 2008 at 5:14 pm
Excellent shots! By the way, the noise levels on the new Canons including the 40d and the 1D are astoundingly low ISO 400 looks smooth as can be, much like ISO 100 on my 20d.
January 3rd, 2008 at 4:11 am
Those odd patterns on the eye are a “morphgenetic pattern,” which was a favorite research subject of Alan Turing. Yes, that Turing.
January 11th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
The ISO thing is one of the reasons why I recently dumped my Rebel XT and switched to a Nikon (I went overboard and went with the D300 – but that’s a different story). Many of the Nikons have “Auto ISO” which allows you to set a “slowest shutter” – and cranks up the ISO to make sure you don’t go slower than that in dark light. And drops the ISO again once you use flash or have better light.
Priceless.