Oh wow, gorgeous bird!

Herons look so incredibly cool. Until you see them from the front, of course. Gorgeous shot!

You drive through the fields and spot a dishevelled young woman hunching over roadkill, reaching into the corpse with pliers as flies buzz around her. You accidentally make eye contact just as she - grinning - drops a writhing maggot into a translucent plastic bottle.

Why settle when I could get a 800mm 5.6 for a mere 14k?

The only reason I didn’t impulse buy a teleconverter to tack on my impulse bought 600mm is that it would just get me (more) underexposed pictures. But the urge is real, and we don’t even have bald eagles around here.

I saw some active webrings on neocities sites!

Try cloudhiker

Amazing scene! That must have been great to watch. Less so to hear!

A handsome boi!

So mossy. It’s beautiful!

This is so disheartening. The more into nature photography I get, the more I realise how smart and chill bees are and the more I love them. I hope research like this will lead to better protection, but I don’t have high hopes…

Me too! It’s been bugging me that I’ll never know.

I saw php error logs cause a full disk in a few minutes (thankfully on a shared dev server), thanks to an accidental endless loop that just flooded everything with a wall of notices…

And, working with a CMS that allows third-party plugins that don’t bother to catch exceptions, aggressive web crawlers are not a good thing to encounter on a weekend… 1 exception x 400000 product pages makes for a loooot of text.

*Looks guiltily at the kalimba sitting on her bookshelf.* I absolutely do not see what you mean. At all.

Reflective surfaces are horrible to photograph through and I have no tips. For the low light, is it because brightness might disturb the tarantulas? Otherwise, DIY photo light boxes might be of help and they are cheap-ish to make. Maybe try to put your phone on a stand/bean bag, adjust the focus (if your phone lets you), and set a timer, so the phone will not move while it takes the picture (if the spiders are very mobile, you might be out of luck).

On the tarantulas: that’s fantastic. Will you be posting pics somewhere?

On photography:

So I started out with a an entry level canon camera (eos 4000D) which was only 280€.
I immediately discovered that wasn’t good enough for birds, so I ordered a 55-250mm telescopic lens two days later.
I then saw a heron on the other side of a river and I was salt incarnate because I couldn’t zoom enough, so I impulse bought a 1500€ 150-600mm lens (and a tripod because that stuff weights around 2.5kg).
The whole process took two weeks. Then, maybe a month later, covid hit and I remembered I really like being inside and the gear collected dust for three years.

Cue this summer. “You should go outside and take pictures again,” I told myself. And so I started taking pictures of bugs. But I was not satisfied with the quality of the pictures: bugs need a really fast shutter speed and an aperture that will allow to get more than a 2mm slice of them sharp.
So I ordered a 1500€ semi-pro camera.
But that camera came with a different type of mount, so my existing lenses were not compatible! And the adapter ring was out of stock for the foreseeable future!
So I bought a 600€ macro lens.
And then a led light to use with it on cloudy days.
And a monopod.
I might need a polarizing filter, a sect of reflectors, and extension tubes to get higher magnification.
…

I hope that horror story helped keep you (and anyone who reads this) away from photography. ADHD people especially: NO. DO NOT. DON’T.

This is AMAZING! Thank you! Gosh, those translucent jelly babies. Fascinating video (also TIL the “egg” becomes the abdomen, which is really cool).

As an aside, looking at the man’s setup, I’m starting to think that bug keeping might just compete with photography in the “bottomless money pit” category. Tell me it isn’t so.