Antx Anty Antz

IISc is home to over 90 species of ants!!!
Some of these are actually different castes of the same species. Try and see if you can guess which. Don't cheat and look at the jpg names :)

Semis

Hmm the Natural History Museum and the BBC run a wildlife photography competition thats the most prestigious in the world. The top award is called Wildlife photographer of the year, prefixed by the company sponsoring it and postfixed by the year.

I'd sent entries for the first time this year, and got a mail yesterday saying I'd gotten as far as the semi finals. While I cant help but be a wee bit sorry I didnt do better, semis is good right?

Water

I learnt to swim recently, pretty late in life, I guess. The first thing I had to do was get comfortable in the water, believe me it's still a struggle sometimes, I can get all tense if things aren't quite so...But the one image that kept me going, that was the motivation to learn to swim, was this image of leaping in and cuting my way face first through this blue thing. Oh, I know it sounds stupid and very 'filmy', but God, that image has a sense of abandon and freedom I am not equal to, I love it.

Water has, as I see it, power to transform, to change beyond recognition. Through it's brute force, partly through its indifference all things are equally brutalised or loved depending on how you see it.

So you can imagine that when I saw the presentation 'The seventh wave" at Magnum I was kind of sucked in and blown away. The photographer Trent Parke it says is their only Aussie photographer, he's also a sports photographer and a much decorated one at that.

His images seem to sometimes say that we're not creatures that belong in water. We remain at the threshold, afraid and fascinated. When we're in this environment, we're aliens. We are afraid of it and yet conquer it, there is triumph in our mastering it and ourselves. Some of our alienation has to do with a loss of innocence (you know water and the womb and so on). The water separates the child and mom. It does not distort the innocent but brutalises her. Hence, eventually us and water isn't about mastery but about return; a return to safety, to silence, to acceptance.

Water isolates us, deprives us of many of our senses, sound, smell, vision. Yet it encloses us in a way that is sensible. Unlike the way that wind makes us aware of air, we are always aware of water, whether mobile or not. This can induce both comfort and panic, its eventually not about the indifferent water, it is about us. It is about temperament.

I enjoy solitude; a long swim is one of my favourite ways of isolating myself. Swimming the middle lane in an empty pool is the closest I've ever come to flying.

Don't try this at home

I get a lot of traffic both here and on my website because of snakes. Its not really surprising I guess, they're fascinating, have captured the imagination of many.

I've had a lot of opportunity to work with them over the last 5 years(!). They're fun, scary and hard to photograph. All animals are camera shy, snakes seem to be particularly so...well ok maybe I just think so...

They're kind of difficult to really vary very much in terms of depiction. Sometimes theres a specific thing you're after and that works.

Other times the story has to built by the viewer. (How I wish the Russell's earth boa image had a person walking down that road in it ....how I wish. It would complete the story with less effort from the viewer....
Other times I just like patterns. Not everyone necessarily likes them or even gets the stupid visual puns involved. The Indian Cobra's latin name is Naja naja naja, pronounced with a j ...Na ja as two separate words in Hindi mean "don't go".... Now you get it ?

If you're really really lucky though you get to watch some truly amazing behaviour and then to photograph it up close. Like the Rat snakes in combat dance below. Its a long ritualised display for dominance between two male snakes, which occurs in the breeding months, the months at the end of winter approaching summer. This was in the days that I didnt have all the appropriate lenses...I took it with a 28-105, you can go ahead and try and guess how close they were to me....Not that i was afraid they were much too engrossed in themselves to worry about me. And anyway, all I could worry abt was the perfect shot. Don't you just love all that muscle and movement?

Anyway...parting shot... good night.!

Old pictures, new pictures: good pictures

Magnum has always had the big guns in its stable, the names are just frightening big. However given the recent changes in journalistic photography, they've begun to do a lot more than just sell and manage the work of these artists. One of these very interesting endevours is their today's pictures at the Slate website. The most recent one on the decisive moment made me want to blog this. It has Cartier-Bresson's definition of the decisive moment. Different from what I believed it was...

Anyway, the other big thing off course are their Multimedia presentations, see them ALL if you can. They're an education in themselves, in photography, the art and the talk. For 'popular' media they are amazingly 'critical', in the sense of art criticism. They are reflexive and view photography and photographers as much as the products, the photographs or the stories.

One of the things I love to do is look at pictures, mine and those of other people. I'm not a careful a reader as I'd like to be, patience doesnt come easily to me. And images have a different language, that requires a relearning. But I love practicing my eyes, it gets there slowly, a bit at a time. These resources ensure I've a lot to look at.

Sometimes off course one worries that these things arent quite contemporary enough. (Although Magnum does have stuff on recent events, very recent ones, the photographers really aren't, although I'm not really sure who the contemporary ones are.) Also off course, the Magnum kind of person rarely strays outside the journalistic/social issue core. I suppose its a good idea to be looking at other movements, the fashion/commercial/art people do tend to push the envelope somewhat more. (I don't even know how to really categorise them, they are different.)

Do take a look, its kinda cool, all those images. They make me starry eyed.

"Sharpness is a bourgeois concept" - H. Cartier Bresson

Now you wont often find nature or wildlife photographers quoting Cartier-Bresson. Or even in the least daunted by the fact that we as a community have almost no thinkers / writers /critics .

And you will almost never find them deriding sharpness. We love the soft morning light or mist. And we even love the glow of good bokeh. But the subject must be sharp, selective focus....and all that jazz.

Sometimes, I grow a bit tired of it. Sharpness, like any other feature of a photograph, exists only to serve what the photograph illustrates. I dont know if it detracts if it does not add, it does not matter I would argue. To quote another biggie, Ansel Adams "There is nothing more useless than a sharp photograph of a fuzzy concept." If the pic dictates fuzz, go ahead fuzz it.

I can't see the picture of a windblown and wild, hanging parasitic plant thats anything but fuzzy. The wind is in the fuzz, a drooping dangling plant is always at the mercy of the wind. The uncertain borders are the melting of identity that all parasites must feel. Most people who look up at these trees dont even see them as being seperate from the trees they attach to. How do you make it any other way?

Landscape, medium format and me

Sometimes off course I use wide angles to do what they were intended to, to make landscapes.

The first one is the Airfield at IISc. A place where a lot of people find they like to go to escape (!) the canopy! We have a unending sometimes oppresive canopy, if you're a photographer you know exactly how dark it makes things. Apart from this off course the fact that in the overcast months it can get pretty gloomy in the building and so on. Nothing really ever looks and feels like sunlight, no lamps, no bulbs can recreate that feeling. The Airfield is a grassland, wide open spaces, the wind and sky.

This, the other one, is the pond in Jubilee, overgrown and dry. The rains have greened it, but not yet filled it. In a good year it gets filled to the other rim, where the Agaves are, with water. White breasted Moorhens forage at the borders and Kingfishers fish in it.

The rains are on their way as you can see, and hopefully so is enough water to restart this cycle. The thing I love about this picture (and actually this place) is the chaos of it all. Everything competes for your attention in its sheer greenness. The Jatropha in the foreground, the Vincas putting the heads through the rock, the ridge on the other side with its massive Agaves and dead trees...and the carpet on the floor of the pond. Now how I wish I had a medium format camera, so you could see every piece for eternity, detailed and in full colour. The D70, my D70, reduces the Agave to a few pixels....and I might never be able to blow this up big enough to have the picture ever 'feel' like the place....oh well, not that I am complaining, not within earshot of my camera :)

Hidden

This is the young chick of a Yellow wattled lapwing. They're usually precocious leaving the nest early, a good strategy considering the nest is on the ground making them easy prey.

This one was walking around before it had learnt to fly. And its strategy was to duck head under grass and lie absolutely still. The body colour blends right in with the ground and you cant really see them, sometimes even when you are a few feet from them. Luckily for me, I saw this one. I was careful to be slow and not freak it out too much. And I got pictures. I do always worry about getting this close to wild animals and close it is because this is a wide lens.

The wide was a decision. I wanted the sense of protective niche under the grass in an open space, the low angle gets you 'into' this niche. Theres an edge in this open space that you can see the beginning of on the left hand side of the image. The few trees on one side underscore the lack elsewhere. The angle was also slightly decided by where the sun came from, to prevent the bird from completely overexposing, I had to make sure my shadow fell on it. Off course it was also prompted by the fact that I had only two lenses with me...this or my bazooka. I wish I'd had my close up lens, to make some nice portraits...oh well.

It's still summer

And the skies are blue...noon and night. The cattails in the swamp have done their work. And now they must cast their seed to the wind.

No news, no talk...calendars up, go buy. I need to buy a flash, actually two if you're generous.

There will be 10 new students in my department. Its an all time record. I wonder if someone is already trained and will take over SRV, I so hope so.

Oh yeah, also click on pictures to see (slightly) bigger versions.

Convergent evolution? Or Whats a blind snake?

Does that look like an earthworm? Look closely? An earthworm would have a large band about a third of the way down from its head. And you would see horizontal segments. You dont see them here.

Well thats cause its a snake! They're called blind snakes. They're burrowing animals, the same size as an earthworm albeit a little darker. If you look closely you'll see the scales. The burrowing lifestyle obviates the need for eyes, so they have very very reduced eyes which are covered with scales. They can probably just make out light and dark. You can see them in the second image.

So if you ever see an earthworm that moving sort of too quickly and too much like a vertebrate, its cause its a snake.


Do you also notice that while the head (which is poking out through the loop of the snakes body) is blunt, the tail is kinda pointy? This snake and I think many other species poke you with the pointy end! And yes they smell! The mouths too small to bite, I believe they use a funny eating mechanism called 'mandibular raking'. Heres some videos made by a guy who works on them.

Places and pictures: location could be everything

I've had several discussions recently, over rights, over whether a person who has not taken the images but is 'owner' of the property in which an image was taken has any control over how the images might be used.

This is a reading of the laws in the US. I guess India is similar, its hard to tell right now though. Most laws seem to relate to people not really to places, you can photograph in most places and commercially exploit those images. Except off course places where it is expressly forbidden, I suppose defence installations, airports, etc. (I'm personally not even sure that some places that forbid photography can do so legally!) .

But thats not really the tack I'm going to take in this post. Not the legal one, I will eventually find out, but this post takes a different point of view. If these images were paintings instead of photographs, I believe most people wouldn't think even for a minute before saying that the maker of the painting should have every right to use it as he pleased and the owner of the property should have no control whatsoever over the image.

I believe this is so for several reasons, the most important being that we see painting even the most realistic one as being interpretive, not literal. There are other arguments which would relate largely to the time and effort paintings take. And off course the belief is that photography is not.

Yet one Nat Geo photog who was asked what shutter speed he used for a particular picture said, one 6oth of a second and a lifetime. Each photograph is truly a lifetime in the making and is interpretive. There are as many artistic decisions in making a photograph as there are in making a painting. You pick subject, lens, angle, exposure, time of day, arrangement of objects when and if possible, depth of field, film for qualities of colour response and ISO (or if you use digital like me White balance and ISO). These are all 'creative' choices. The same object can be made to look very very different based on these choices, and more importantly from and artistic point of view to signify very very different things, tell different stories. Look at the two images in this post they are images of the same thing, an Agave. (Theres another story behind these pictures as well, one that will embarrass me, so I will not tell it!) Yet the two images are completely different and will be read by most viewers completely differently!

While the shutter speed of a single exposure is usually within a second, a particular photograph can take as much as days, weeks or even months to make. You know the Nat Geo hit rate for number of exposure vs number of published pictures is about 0.01%; a few hundred thousand pictures every year! With the advent of digital tech its probably even more. Why take me, I've shot seriously for what, two-two and a half years? I have made over 20,000 exposures.

Think then not only about the time taken to make these exposures, but the time it takes to sort through them and pick the ones you want to use/take further, a process called editing. Then post-processing, dodging, burning, colour correcting, croping, etc. (Something even film photographers did, not just us digi plus photoshoppers as some old timers like to claim. Then it was the darkroom, now its the digital darkroom.)

In the final analysis, a photograph can take as much time as a small oil, a large watercolour, or a medium pastel sketch. Ask me, I've done all of these! And it takes a lifetime to make a good one, to know the good one. And should be considered as independant of the place they were made as you would a painting!

So think again when you think of a photograph as a snapshot....good ones aren't.

Shooting again

The weekend was good. Like all weekends that are actually spent shooting. Its good to be out again.

But today was a bad day. I'm easily disturbed but well... See someone wanted to use my pictures for nothing gratis and I said no. The person got pissed off and thought I had no loyalty and so on, and believed for various reasons that I should do this, allow the use of the images free.

What I'm wondering is should anyone? I know for one that my images take work and a LOT of dedication. It takes a certain amount of knowledge, a certain amount of research into my subjects. None of these is a one session shot, each session often takes 4-5 maybe even more hours at a strech, in the 'elements'. Often immobile in uncomfortable positions, or moving continously and cautiously for ages or being some weird kind of contortionist. I love it, but its work. Much more relevantly, the images are worth money, they are actually reasonably valuable or at least my agency thinks so. Why should anyone give away anything unless they feel compelled to? Why should anyone expect this kind of compulsion?

This kind of 'grabbing' is even true of a lot of contests. Even participating in these contests not just winning allows the company sweeping rights over the images. It cant be a good thing for photographers, can it? By many estimates the number of images made in the last few years is orders of magnitude greater than that in say the 90s. There's a flood of images out there, on flickr, blogs, online (penny) stock agencies, theres people giving them away for the asking.
This glut of images makes people believe that images are easy to make and well a dime a dozen But good images are not. It makes it harder for people like me, who are on the fringes of being pros to convince people that 'no, not for free'. I'm sure its made the renumeration for pros come down somewhat.

Its even shittier when you're up against people who dont know good images from bad, who wouldnt see quality and craftsmanship if it bit them in the *&%^#$. And then if you're in India and you're a young student, why you're just ripe for exploitation aren't you? Maybe this isn't true, but tell me really if any of you are reading this out there, how much unpaid work have you done lately? Work that doesnt fall within your real responsibilities that you're expected to do anyway, for NOTHING. My guess is if you're a student, a lot....

Think about it a bit, and next time just say 'NO'

In knots

Yea!! I finally updated my site, with a few hundred new pictures. So folks who'd got bored seeing old stuff could go look for new stuff....except most people who knew the old place dont know this place. so new people go see new site....


i love the internet and my propensity for tying myself up in knots in it.

Holometabolous insects

Hmm, I had found me some unhatched lacewing eggs, upon which I kept a very close eye. This ere eye hoped to catch the hatching and to not miss the young ones as I had with the the last series of eggs. (check prev posts). Here's what an adult looks like.

Pretty faerielike huh? Well they're a little like dragonflies but to the good biologist me what sets them apart is the fact that some of them have ears....on their wings!

Well, so for some reason I was expecting little baby lacewings to pop out of these eggs... small versions of big momma/daddy you know? Quite a surprise when I got these hairy creatures instead!

Well, vive holometabolous insects....these lacewing larvae as I had conveniently forgotten are well known for their voracious appetites for many small creatures, mosquitoes, their larvae, aphids, etc. They are often used in biological pest control programmes for this reason, lacewing eggs are actually sold to you so you can 'spread them throughout your fields or gardens' to acheive maximum pest control.

The larvae eventually pupate and voila you have an adult...and no I havent found a lacewing pupa just yet !

Light and line

All photos in this post except the first are not mine and are preceded by links to the original
There are rewards when you wake up early in the morning. The vines are lianas (woody creepers) brought here to ces from the western ghats, planted years ago. They mesmerise everyone who sees them the first time. Its like a breath from a rainforest somewhere hit the city of bangalore. The building at the back is my department.


The reason I picked this image is that its about lines, it verges on a graphic version of a line photograph. And yet its not.

Here are a few examples of graphic line images. This one uses the classic quality of repitition.
repitition

heres repitition and symmetry breaking
rupture

Heres another, uses form, depth and curves. (And, off course, some beauiful tonality)
curves

You'll notice that these images have very simple geometries, something that makes many line images intuitive and quick to 'grasp'. You see the image, finding the form, are led around the image exactly as the photographers eye saw it.

Occasionally the repititive line is used to dilineate form, to explore smooth curvy geometries
form

Some photographs explore the line as a twisty concept...
twisted


Few explore, straight and twisty lines in a confused ungeometric pattern. Which is why i like that picture....

Open wide

I need a go ahead for a project and until that happens I'm slacking a little on shooting. Well that and its hot, and I am killing myself learning how to swim well....Summers lovely.

Quick post about why a good wide is a MUST for a wildlife photographer

Animals live in some kind of environment and sometimes you want to depict that relationship in an image. Often however the problem is that the elements of the that environment, in which the animals is situated are much larger than the animal itself.

And any image that has both in the same shot if its made with a conventional mid-range to long tele is going the compress the tiny animal against a grand huge background. this your standard too tiny in the frame animal. mind you, that you can choose to show only some part of that environment and let the rest suggest itself as 'more of the same'. Here's an example.

Fairly informative. Pond herons roost on dead trees. But it will by its very nature leave out something. for instance that this particular dead tree is next to a pond. If you try and include the pond in the pict by zooming out. well the heron become smaller....and the pond becomes the picture....

So if you want a landscape feel to your image, want to give a feel of the WHOLE area, and yet want to have your animals at a size thats noticable, try a wide.

Whats a wide allows you to do, is create a perspective that the human eye does not normally have. It makes objects closer to it much larger than those further away.

(link to get you to understand this.)

so now if you can manage to get close to your animal and have all your landscape elements neatly organised behind the animal, voila animal elements all similar sizes managing equal amounts of attention.....

easier said than done, lets see you get a couple of inches from this mongooses nose!

Keystone species and co-evolution

When you build an arch, there’s a stone in the middle. If you take this central stone out the whole arch collapses. And it’s called the keystone. Ecologists have borrowed the term to describe a species that is ‘key’ to an ecosystem, if you take it out the whole system collapses.

There’s a lot of ways you could be a keystone species, produce a lot of food for instance, or produce food in a season where everything else doesn’t. Maybe all the energy in the system goes through this species at some point, and if you remove it there are two separate entities with no flow between them...producers one end, eaters the other. This is called a wasp waist system; the keystone species would be the one at the waist.

Fig trees are thought of as a keystone species. And sometime you can see why. They produce a LOT of food and often different trees will bloom and fruit at asynchronously, keeping food available to a system. There are usually a huge number of animals that will come to the smells of ripening fig fruits. Some of them will be young boys and girls on their way from school, off course!

We rarely notice figs when they’re not ripe however, which is kind of funny because a lot of other creatures do and they are attracted to them. Figs have another story going, one of co-evolution. The fig is actually a structure called a syconium and its flowers are enclosed inside it. For these flowers to be pollinated, a pollinator must get inside the fig. Here’s where the fig wasps come into the story. A female wasp finds a receptive fig digs into it, she then pollinates some flowers (in some species seemingly intentionally, in others not), after or along with this she lays her eggs in some of the flowers. And then dies. Several wasps may lay in a single fig. Once the next generation of wasps is born, the females mate with the males, the males dig an exit and the females fly off looking for the next fig.

(Dont have a pic of the pollinator yet, coming soon)

But that isnt it, there are others in the system, other wasps the gallers. These guys are in some ways the cheats of the system. They lay their eggs from the outside inducing galls for their larvae to eat. The larvae of some even eat the larvae of those that came before. Thats a galler laying eggs.

Off course the gallers arent all shiny happy people, because right behind that lovely fig ripe for the laying lurks the big bad.........ANT. Red weaver ants, those big bad evil creatures that will shy from attacking nothing, wait for these wasps (pollinators and gallers) to eat them.

They get them too sometime, these little flitty things. Heres two ants fighting over who gets to keep the wasp.

So thats the fig wasp story, gleaned from the comprehensive presentation of Mahua and Yuvraj at CES, IISc.

Food

Can you imagine a world where you stumble onto a pile of your favourite food, and its BIGGER than you?

Speed

One thing about a lot of wildlife, its come and gone before you know it. A split second of something, is often all you'll ever get. If you're not fast, you wont have pictures. Think about it, I waited a few hours for this 100th of a second.

The other thing is get level. What I like most abt this image apart from the motion is that you can see the space between the ground and the belly. It's an animal that spends its life close to the ground, in the undergrowth. Its a long animal, its a hairy animal and a quick one. The image manages to convey all of that in an abstraction.

A head would distract from this message, it would give the animal an idividual personality, perhaps an expression. And we would be diverted there...maybe not such a bad thing, but it wouldnt be this picture...

This picture for example, it suggests, tall, or actually long since the animals arent usually standing. but it adds other elements, vigiliance, and for me certainly humor in that bow-legged very awkward looking hind leg stand. theres the other elements for instance, where did this neatly peeled banana come from? and mongooses eat bananas?

This other image of the mongoose standing taken from the back, on the other hand ,has tall / long and vigiliant. none of the other elements. its not funny, either which could be good or bad....

The subtext to all this is that photography often is about deciding how much to leave in or out. not only in elements but even in subjective experience of a picture.

Some pictures base themselves on a narrative in the elements that are in the picture. the one below for instance, theres a temple, theres offerings, theres a mongoose eating them, theres a larger looking mongoose (most likely mum) hanging around waiting in the background. you can construct a fairly complete and complex narrative around that. And these are apparently all the rage now, the complete story in a frame.

but there are complete, if not complex stories, in shots like the first one. removing elements from an image does not necessarily compact the scope of an image. but it does place greater demands on a viewer. It is therefore harder to pull off successfully.

Usually its got to trigger some instantaneous gut feeling. then give you just a couple of details and leave you with that.

the first picture, hey whats that moving so quickly. hmm legs, fur = animal, probably some long thing, didnt fit in the picture. wheres it going to in such a hurry? maybe its escaping from something. maybe not, thats always how you see critters, scurrying off to their next unknowable task...furtive, hiding under stuff, bellys scraping the ground. no wonder we hardly ever see em. just some blur off the corner of the eye. .....no wonder the weasel (this looks like one) has been associated with sneakiness...and so on

if that tenuous something can be triggered i think a photo works. off course i dont know if it does for you, you could tell me. but thats (sometimes) what i try and guess at when i pick something and discard some pics...

Sometimes its just about being awake

And then off course once you've seen the opportunity, about taking it. I'm sure you've seen these pots in you're home. well i realised there was a just begun one in mine and i figured that well the wasp will come back and finish it. so i waited for it. the first set of pictures were ok...not close enough, light wasnt right. but because i knew what the wasp would do i could set it up so things would be right...

Then i waited over several days, hoping to catch a trip when she was bringing some mud in...and now i'll wait for until she brings over some caterpillars.
Other times its even easier than that. these are lacewing eggs, they've hatched unfortunately. next time i hope to catch them before that happens. These were on my balcony curtains, the red lights them up nicely, doesnt it?

oh the other story in this one? make sure you've backed up before you delete!!!! i deleted all the RAWs for this session and theres no back up, oh well, they're still there i'll try and redo it .

The addendum to this story is that I was never really able to 'redo' it to my satisfaction. The positions of the eggs had been altered due to many things...and I couldnt replicate what I wanted to. Moral of the story, do not loose your RAW files.

What's luck got to do with it?

Something, a little bit ...I waited nearly 3 hours for these pictures. I've waited 2 years to wait those 3 hrs!

I walked down a mud path on campus a few days back, looking for owls. I didnt find any. The lucky bit was that a family of three mongooses were there instead. They probably visit this bounty of bananas left behind by a devotee next to a small roadside shrine once in a day. I happened to walk by at the time that they made their daily visit and saw them before they disappeared into the brush. That was lucky....I know now they are there maybe, 20-30 mins cumulative in a day.

I didnt get any shots on that first day. I've gone back to that place 4-5 times now. This thursday, I had a day off and spent nearly three hours waiting for them to turn up. And they did.

Originally posted: Feb 09 2006

STreeeeeeeeeeTCH

A gray wagtail down at the water level in the pond in Jubliee. It was a long wait before this fella got accustomed to me. The white breasted water hen at the other end didnt want any truck with me, ever. And although she got chased around for invading another wb waterhens turf several times she didnt come any closer to me.

Its an amazing place down there, last week i spent the good part of a day there...theres about 6 different odonates. and they seem to a certain extent to seperate their display times out through the day. the surface of the pond is covered with flies that walk on the duck weed and scum. the lovely green in the picture is actually the duckweed on the surface of the pond. Theres a checkie who hunts among it. and a whole host of birds that feed all day and then spend the night in the brush by the edges.

interestingly there arent as many mosquitoes as you would imagine. perhaps because the dragonflies eat them....

Originally posted: Jan 17 2006

Wall climber

Meet my christmas present! Wolf snake (Lycodon aulicus). Often mistaken for the venomous common krait, these are non-poisonous. And great wall climbers. We caught him/her from PD block and took some photographs and let him go....heres another one.