I spent most of January in Europe, first taking a morphometrics course at the Institut Català de Paleontologia Miquel Crusafont, and then collecting data at the Natural History Museum in London. It was a lot of fun; I learned a lot (and I got data!), but I am also exhausted.

In between Spain and England, I also had the time to stop in Paris  for a few days. The natural history museum there is one of the best I’ve ever seen — I really don’t have enough nice things to say about it, and I’m planning a more extensive blog post on it a little later this week … but, in the meantime, here’s a teaser shot.

Happy 2012, everyone.

2011 was an incredibly crazy year for me, personally, academically, professionally and, oh yeah, photographically.

I learned new things, met excellent people and saw some great wildlife. I’m hopefully almost done with my master’s degree, and am applying to Ph.D. programs. I’m giving my second scientific talk in a week, then going to Europe for a morphometrics workshop and data collection.

I didn’t see myself getting here from where I was a year ago, but I’m pretty happy.

To ring in the new year, here’s a summary of my 2011, in pictures.

I went to Hawaiʻi for the first time in January.  It was one of the most extraordinary places I’ve ever been, and I’ll definitely be back. More »

I am now the proud owner of a remote trigger for my flash! This is a good thing, except that it is winter in Colorado, which means that there is a foot of snow outside my door. This is not really conducive to macro photography.

However, there is an insect zoo in Westminster, and I haven’t been there for about two years, when I first bought my macro lens.

So, today, I went back so that I could experiment with using an off-camera flash for lighting (and also to spend quality time and eat Thai food with a friend, but that is outside the scope of the blog, probably).

Lighting from the side, to give a nice, super dramatic silhouette to this mantis

Front lighting with a long lens at 250 mm + 12 mm extension tube.

Lighting from the front & bottom for a close-up of this owl butterfly.

The lesson of the day was probably that it is difficult to juggle a flash, a camera and a butterfly all at once.

One of my favorite techniques that I took back from the BugShot 2011 workshop was studio lighting using a white box. And since I had my white box out today, taking portraits of my blood python (Python curtus curtus), I figured that I’d show you all what I do! This is probably terrible photography advice that you should feel free to ignore, but maybe some of you will find it helpful.

Anyway, this is my setup:

Basically, this consists of a frame made of copious amounts of plastic dowels, and also an incredible amount of masking tape. The top and bottom are white poster board, while the slides consist of plain old printer paper. And masking tape.

Inside the box, I use the flashes from my Canon Macro Twin Lite to bounce off of the sides, producing nice, even lighting. I also have a flashlight as a focusing light, upside-down drinking glasses to keep my flashes in place (I believe in hi-tech solutions to my problems), and a very angry snake. (Also some cat toys. I’m not sure why those are there, but they’re probably important.)

The most challenging part of this is figuring out how to get the lights positioned so that my light sources will be where I want them to be. I have a little foot that I can mount my flashes on for some extra flexibility, and I’ve also built cheap little platforms to move them around the box, but it can be a little tricky to get things just right.

My normal setting for this kind of a white box is a pretty high depth of field (around f/22) combined with powered-up flashes (one flash head is usually at full power, the other at 1/2).

There are things that I don’t like about the setup. It doesn’t have a clean bottom edge, so my subjects have to be in the center of the white box, and dealing with my flashes is occasionally the most frustrating thing in the universe, ever. It can also produce some really wonky-looking reflections in my subjects’ eyes.

But, it was super cheap, and it’s flexible enough that I can mess around with it in a bunch of different ways to create new effects  — I can substitute different colored papers for backgrounds, bring in the sides to create a smaller white box, and I can disassemble it pretty easily to take into the field. (As long as I remember to bring masking tape!)

Oh, and it was also cheap enough that I won’t ever feel bad about my lost investment if I do decide to scrap it and start all over again.

Quick photo I took of a nursey web spider while I was out hiking today. For some reason, insects seem to be pretty sparse on the ground here in Texas, but we have no shortage of spiders out and about in November. For the most part, they seem to be lycosids, but there are a couple of other spiders hanging about, like this nursery web spider.

I feel like I don’t put up enough geology pictures on the blog. It’s all herps and bugs and sometimes other animals, maybe even a plant  …. but, really, there aren’t nearly enough rocks. So, here’s a picture of one of the creeks near my place, which is both a very nice example of water erosion, and home to an ungodly number of Acris crepitans, if you happen to be in the area and are fond of tiny, annoying hylids.

Here’s a late-season dragonfly for you. I love cold mornings because I can sneak up on dragonflies before they even know I’m there.

I have a new flash and a new diffuser, so I took a couple of test shots today to see how well it works. I’m not sure it’s perfect … but it’s not bad. (Certainly worth the $0.69 of mylar and chopped-up-cereal-box that I used to make my diffuser!)

Er, hi there, blog friends! I’m not dead … just really busy.

To make up for it, here’s some fungus, taken with my Nikon Coolpix digicam.

I make no promises that this is going to be a regular thing, but I hope you enjoy him.

Taking a stab in the dark, I’d guess that this is a juvenile Gulf Coast Toad (Incilius valliceps), since even at this tiny size, Bufo tend to have relatively obvious parotid glands, but I’d welcome any alternative taxonomic opinions…