The rains

Jungle myna collects termites at emergence
The rains have been on now off again this season in Bangalore. (And the last season, and the one before that). I bet every creature that synchronizes it's life cycle to the rains is just a tad confused. Nonetheless, the showers over the last few days brought a dutiful few termites out of their holes in the ground.


A Common myna joins in the act
And the birds dutifully waited as well. The pickings were good and even the littlest creature got a little something. Out of each hole would emerge a few termites and then stop. The flock birds kept whirling from one hole to another trying to catch the stutters of the food stream at the right moments. Most they caught, the few that escaped will perhaps breed and create new streams for the coming years.




A Zitting cisticola/ Streaked fantail warbler with a termite

Where have I been?

PS. I work on field crickets
I've been away from the blog for a bit. Heres why: I just presented my thesis work to the department. It went well and it's done! Yea! Four of us actually gave what are called colloquia in just one week. And the junta are wondering what they're going to do over the next week when there aren't any!

It's done and I should be able to update a bit more often from now on again, hope I haven't lost all of you in the intervening time.

Wildlife photo secrets(5): Which one's are the keepers?

Red weaver ants eat a dead Giant African land snail
Disclaimer: This is going to be my most ambitious post ever. Please disagree with me and tell me how you do it, we will all be the richer for it.
Can't get no satisfaction

So you know how to take photographs? You know about aperture and you know about shutter speed, and you got exposure down pat and you can even light up things perfectly. You got the best gear, your money can buy. You can take pleasant, well lit, aesthetic pictures. But you still can't get no...satisfaction. You look at your shots and they seem an incoherent mess. Then you look at someone else's, and they seem so... together and each of their shots seem so ...good! What's going on?

Everyone, at least every human hits this plateau. You learn like crazy in the beginning and the curve is steep and then it peters out. You plateau out, and then flounder because you don't know which way is up. You look at shots that once made you the proudest photographer in the world and they aren't enough anymore. How do you get better? As Mike Johnston put it, that is the crucial sentence. You need to want this first, everything else follows. If you don't ask it you're a non-starter.

Recently hatched spiders parachute off their natal leaf
What does this have to do with keepers, or basically good photo-editing? Everything. Get this, shooting great pictures is only the first step. Knowing the good ones from the bad is the second. To become a better photographer, you must know good photography.


Step 1: Intention
Here comes the contentious part. What is good photography? The way I see it, is it all comes down to, what is the intention behind the photography, whether it is a useful / interesting / whathaveyou intention, and whether it is achieved. The second and the third as you can obviously see are extremely subjective. Whether something is worth it or not and whether it achieve what you want is debatable. Having an intention at all is not subjective...(or is it? Humans are known to make up post hoc for why they did something even when they could not have had any reason to do so.)

So then one of the first steps is to have an intention, an intended goal, preferably before you shoot. Less desirable would be to generate it for a certain specific project when editing through your archive for it. What is the story / narrative / emotion / feeling / thought that you want your photograph(s) to convey? What is it's purpose? Why is it in your keep section? Many people fail right at this step. They don't have one.

A Zitting cisticola zits
To me all the other things, light, aesthetics, composition, colour, sharpness, bokeh, everything is eventually subservient to this goal. If they don't serve it, they detract. Never make these your ends, you'll will have beautiful, sharp, etc photographs not good ones. Because good asks good for what?


Step 2: Is it worth it?
Off course, cueing from the previous section, cleverly you are going to ask for whom? Here is where your audience comes in. Who is this image intended for and are they/he/she/it going to think it's worth it. It's subjective, but it's better focused. There are no rules for who the audience is (it can even be just you). But once you have picked one, you've got to play by their rules. Or know them, at least, and break them effectively and to some effect.

You cannot (usually) show an orthodox family audience something like Mapplethorpe's revolutionary presentation of human sexuality and expect them to be pleased about being shaken from their conventions . And you can't show art critics your family shots and expect kudos for originality. There are certain situations (and intentions) in which these statements break down, but presumably you get the drift. Worth it, is worth it for whom?

Step 3: Is it good enough?
Can I do better at telling this story? Is there actually a better story to tell that I have learnt about as I made the images for this story? Does this image effectively pull up the response that I want from my intended audience? If not how can I better it? What would be more effective? In a word, iteration.

A bat pollinated bloom of the African sausage tree
And the willingness to drop the not so good ones. Remember your first may be but usually won't be, your best. As I've said before, there is no simpler non-secret to getting better shots than to keep trying. Judge as objectively as you can, when that begins to fail you, find a sounding board use it. Look at other pictures, learn to discriminate between/judge them. Learn what makes one bird / landscape / insect / whathaveyou photograph better than another, for a goal and an audience. then apply what you learn there to your own. Start over.

And that's how I hope to get better...How do you do it?

Others in this series: Wildlife secrets parts 1, 2, 3 and 4.

Unsuni: The unheard

We had a performance entitled 'Unsuni' performed by Mallika Sarabhai's troop Darpan at the CSIC auditorium this Friday.
In their own words from the website of Unsuni:

"The Unsuni project intends to bring the stories of those people, the faceless, voiceless, helpless masses, to the forefront of our conscience, to the front pages of the news. While not wanting to take away pride in India’s successes, we want to provoke those who can make a difference to take action to make things better for the unfortunate.
...
We aim to become a catalyst in having this volunteerism become a movement, by tying together with activists and NGOs who need help and can direct youths’ energy properly and usefully. We feel that if India is to grow as a healthy country and not one increasingly threatened by Naxalism and violence, it is an essential and urgently needed step that we fuel the debate on the marginalized amongst youth that are otherwise obsessed by brands and malls."

Here are some disorganised stills from the performance and the setup before it.

Hmmm word is in...

I didn't win in this years BBC/NHM Wildlife photographer competition.

I did, however, get 11 images as far as the semis and 1 into the finals. Fortunately, this year, unlike the last, I submitted online so I know exactly which ones did get that far. This will hopefully help with editing in future years. The cool part was the ones that I thought would, did actually get to this stage, and the ones that were sort of padding in my opinion, didn't. So my editing isn't probably that off...

Here's your tour of the successful part of my submission.

Nature in Black and White: The aftermath on an orgy















Nature in Black and White:Twisty























Creative visions of nature: Swarm
















Urban and Garden wildlife: Coming home to roost
















Urban and Garden Wildlife: Temple mongoose














Urban and Garden Wildlife: Flight paths
















Wild Choice: Touch me not
















Wild Choice: Boxing match













Wild Choice: Hamlet, Prince of Denmark














Animal Behaviour, Birds: Hiding Lapwing
















Animal Behaviour, Others: Termite Orgy
















Yup, it's one short...it's the finalist short. That one, only if and when it's a winner. Yes, I'm an awful tease!

Cockroach parental care: the story continues

One of the nice things about posting online is the reach and the variety of people who see your stuff and how they in return contribute to your knowledge. I recently received an email from George Beccaloni from the NHM who works on cockroaches who stumbled upon the parental care in cockroaches picture.

It turns out that someone has actually looked at this behavior carefully before. The work was ironically published in a journal whose offices are a short walk from here, Current Science. Here's what Dr. Beccaloni wrote to me.

"Your photo is of a female cockroach in the genus Thorax or Phoraspis. The amazing thing is that the nymphs feed on the blood of the mother which they obtain by biting small holes in the membranes between the segments of her abdomen. Here is some information taken from this book:

"Phlebonotus pallens Serville, a semi-aquatic species found in India, clearly falls in the latter category. Pruthi (1933) collected a female in south India, not noticing anything extraordinary about the specimen. Upon sorting his catch, however, he found that the roach had about a dozen nymphs under her wings. "The wing covers are opaque and the young ones lying under them are so nicely packed," her commented, "that the human eye cannot easily detect on superficial examination that the individual is carrying so many young ones on its body."
Females of this species are flightless, with the hindwings greatly reduced. The forewings, however, are fully formed and arched to create the nymphal space beneath. Roth (1981) speculated that the arched tegmina found in the related genera Phoraspis and Thorax might suggest similar maternal care in those roaches.
He was proved right: Indian entomologist S. Bhoopathy reported in 1998 that the first two nymphal instars of the epilamprine Thorax porcellana Saussure are carried snugly beneath the domed forewings of their mother. This cryptic species feeds on clumps of dead vegetation trapped by the densely intertwining branches of certain shrubs (e.g., Prosopis spicigera, Gymnosporia montana, and Flacourtia sp.). Females produce a single clutch of about 40 eggs annually. Bhoopathy's 1998 study provides the only detailed observation of actual migration of neonate cockroaches to the dorsal depression under the wings (the cockpit?), and so is worth quoting: "Immediately after hatching, the first instar nymphs...crawled over the abdomen of the mother. The upper surface of her abdomen became markedly depressed into a fairly tight spacious trough or chamber with its sides raised. As the nymphs crawled over her body, she raised up her tegmina, which were large, tough, and dome-shaped, and all the nymphs were accommodated compactly; the tegmina were placed in position so as to conceal all the nymphs and to afford perfect protection." It is further noted that the concave dorsal "trough" in which the nymphs ride essentially forms upon the birth of the nymphs, by retraction of the distended internal brood sac after they vacate (Bhoopathy 1998).
More remarkable still, T. porcellana nymphs were found by Bhoopathy to derive liquid nourishment from specialized dorsal pores in their mother's dorsum as well as by the macabre means of piercing her cuticle with specialized sharp mandibles! The nymphs have relatively long, sharp mandibular tooth-like processes, present only in the first two instars, which penetrate the female's abdominal intersegmental membrane. Hemolymph or some other fluid oozing from the wounds is then imbibed by the young roaches. T. porcellana's specialized neonate feeding adaptations - a larger head relative to the body in the first two instars, and mandibular "teeth" lost in later instars - are not as extreme as those of some roaches (see Perisphaeriinae below), but this trophic interaction is curious indeed. Bhoopathy showed that this is an obligate mode of feeding for neonates, as they soon die if removed from the mother. It is hard to say if some other factor contributed to their decline. I would think, for example, that the neonates would be especially prone to desiccation if removed from the cozy chamber atop the mother. Still, the morphological modifications of both mother and offspring indicate the closeness of their relationship; do the dorsal pores provide "milk" of sorts to the young? And is the milk supplemented by blood (hemolymph)?" "

Magnum celebrates it's 60th

Magnum and Slate seem to have streamlined their site. Which is good news since you don't want to have to wait too much when looking at what the call the best of their 60 years.

Now is there a LIFE magazine archive somewhere? I found this in which there is this archive of classic prints.

John Harrington's inconvenient facts

John Harrington writes the excellent blog Photo Business News & Forum. He usually has simple and clear advice on how to ensure that you can earn a living as a freelance photographer. Much of his legal advice is US centric, but I think all other stuff applies across the board. Whether it is how to word contracts, deal with clients or protect your own photographic interests.

From his recent list of facts:
"Fact #1: If every time you produce images, the copyright to them is not yours, you will not earn money - any money - from them in the future. "
...
"Fact #6: Just because a client says they won't pay for something, doesn't mean you must accept, and work under, those terms. You have the power to say "no"."

There are some between and after these that are useful reading for those who wish to hit the next level. And as he points out, even if you don't want to go pro and want to continue doing photography on the side, to do it responsibly you should still follow these rules.


As a commenter points out:
"One could say, "In a free market, shouldn't I be free to undercut anyone and compete on price?" Certainly, but in a free market, enlightened self interest makes the whole concert play, and you are really undercutting yourself in doing so. Why is this reality so hard for some to understand?"

Bricks not in a wall

Would you? I'd much rather just write a cheque...if I could that is!

"Call it a grand idea, good enough to beat all laws of appreciation.

The Indian Institute of Science is planning to sell bricks that once formed hostel blocks, for $1,000 (more than Rs 40,000) each. These bricks are not made of gold but of golden memories, the institute says.

The IISc is confident that its old boys, many of whom are now top researchers and scientists in India and abroad, will pay more than that to take home one of the 8,000 bricks up for sale as centenary souvenirs. "

Somehow that phrase 'old boys' catches my eye....Off course it was a boys hostel...and I imagine girls wouldn't want any part of it :)

From here, first seen here

And thats all we have time for this week

Just one thing before we go, according to the Wikipedia, despite being called parakeets, these are indeed true parrots.

ta dan ta tan tan...etc.

You'll never have to leave home ever again

This is not what I expect from MS, usually from Google. But heck who cares, it looks very exciting!

Niall Benvie on the state of wildlife photography.

"So, it has come to this: more and more people taking more and more similar pictures of the same, celebrity species and locations ... The real problem with wildlife photography is not that there is too much of it but that photographers – amateur and professional – are failing to reflect natural diversity. Far from inhibiting productivity, wildlife photography needs to be expanded greatly, telling the story of species and locations unknown to readers and viewers."

From A crisis in Nature photography: Niall Benvie

Not good...not good at all...

" Two youths working as security guards at the IISC campus allegedly raped a 30-year-old married woman on Saturday night."

From the Deccan Herald.

For the most part I've found security guards extremely helpful. IISc is huge and well I wander around parts where there is no one within sight or earshot. Many students work late at night and leave when theres no one on the streets.

I've and no I know as ever had anything serious happen to them, mostly verbal abuse, one flashing. I've always thanked my lucky stars that I got to begin shooting in a relatively safe place before I head out into the big bad world (I suppose I'll have to at some point). This does not make me happy at all...

Knowing

I find knowing what to shoot is the first step to getting good shots. I spend more than half my unproductive time stumbling around dazed by the heat or by weary feet, looking for something to hold my eye.

In the field, disappointment is not a rare thing. Boredom fortunately for me is.

If memory serves, some big photographer once said to his teacher: Can you now please tell me what to point my lens at?
(1 and 2: Hawk moth; 3: Cicada)


PS. The wings of hawks moths beat at about 85 beats per second. The high frequency insects go as far as 1000 bps. They have muscles that respond with multiple contractions to each action potential so they can go past the upper limit set by neuronal firing. All that speed just to stay in the same place!

The law of unintended consequences: Lantana camara

Blue Tiger butterfly

A superficial glance at this post might lead you to think it's about butterflies. It is in an oblique fashion, but it's mostly about the plant they are all feeding on, Lantana camara. Lantana off course is an exotic, among ecologists a much reviled one.

The native range of this plant is in Central and South America and the Carribean. Lantana was probably introduced into India as far back as the 19th century. It has probably been introduced on multiple occasions as a ornamental or hedge plant. Since then it has nearly taken over the landscape in India, and is now found just about everywhere. It has the dubious honour of being listed as one among the top hundred worst invasive species in the world.

Common Rose butterfly

But it is not the damage that this weed does to local ecology, displacing native species, outcompeting them for resources that makes Lantana the poster-child for the "Law of unintended consequences". No that would be too simple, and many other contenders vie for that title. Whether it is the ill-fated attempt to get Indians to eat snails which now overrun the countryside eating their way through everything green or the cane toads in Australia. The world is rife with examples of human hubris gone awry.

Striped Tiger butterfly

Lantana carves a niche all its own though. It take things one step further. It not only makes itself ubiquitous it has also made itself indispensable. Well, perhaps that's going a bit far out on the line, but certainly key to many ecosystem processes. The key to this plant's success in novel habitats has been two-fold, it's wide tolerance for habitats and it's fruiting and flowering phenology.
Lantana camara flowers and hence fruits through out the year. This plant is a readily available, ubiquitous and massive source of nectar and fruits. With native plants out-competed and locally extinct, Lantana becomes the key source of nectar for many species of butterflies. It is similarly extremely important to several birds as a source of fruit available throughout the year.


Common Nawab
This double whammy means once established Lantana cannot be easily removed without serious ecosystem disruption. Some unpublished work has apparently suggested that several populations of Western Ghat species now rely on Lantana and a crash will be imminent if there is uncontrolled removal of this weed. This off course makes removal of this weed and subsequent restoration of local ecology difficult. Many parameters will have to be considered when attempting such an exercise.


Twany Coaster
Not that dealing with this invasive has been easy. Large seed loads mean that even burning and massive chopping are simply a set-back, not an eradication. This has been a hard hard weed to deal with incredible rebound capabilities. ATREE in Bangalore has been leading one of the more interesting efforts to deal with this menace.





Hawk moth (shot of the week!)
Lantana furniture! Made by tribals in the Male Madeshwara Hills in Karnataka, the project is an interesting mix of community involvement into conservation practices with payoffs for both. So all of you homesteaders who might want to buy furniture might want to give ATREE a call and check out their Lantana catalogue at their offices. You'd be doing your bit.

Wildlife photo secrets(4): the canopy

Small green barbet
Everyone who popped in and said hi on the previous post, thanks. And here's the next 'how-to' promised.

It's very seductive to think of grandiose names for the unknown. The canopy has been called, in scientific literature, the final frontier. Like the deep oceans and space, who also lay claim on that moniker, it's relatively unexplored and the first few forays into it have yielded a lot that is new. The oldest method of trying to get at animals in the canopy was fogging, immensely destructive and unjustifiable (not to mention useless) if you wanted to photograph living animals.

Pariah or Black kite

Then came the more (ahem!) sophisticated methods, the canopy cranes, bridges, rafts, hides and ropes. But do what we might, the human monkey has lost his ancestral ease among branches. All these tools take us up a bit and down again with little lateral leeway. And most of all they are available to very few people, usually researchers and then for a very little time.

So here's the good part, I've found that for urban/semi-urban wildlife photographers there are canopy cranes aplenty. They are called buildings. Many many rooftops, balconies, windows are actually very close to trees, the canopy within touching distance. These can be absolutely great to watch and photograph what usually goes on above eye level.

Blue rock pigeon

Look out for places where trees are close to a opening and then look out in them for animal activity. Whether it's nesting or nest building birds or birds and other animals that come in to feed when the tree fruits or flowers, or even birds that come in to roost or perch. Keep an eye out for anything you can convert into a photographic opportunity. The great thing about this little window of access is the ability to peer from a ready-made hide (the building) into a usually secret world. And off course, eye-level shots that are so much more attractive than those belly shots from below.

Rose ringed parakeet
But that's so much for the larger birds and mammals, what about the insects? The truth is most of those canopy access techniques I spoke about were actually devised in order to reach the smaller creatures, the arthropods. These cannot be shot merely by looking out over a closeby branch. The long lenses don't get you quite that kind of magnification and you can't really get much closer to the animals.




Long horned beetle
There is however a sort of indirect way that you can get at these animals. The photograph of the long horned beetle was got by this technique. In all of my time of hunting in the undergrowth I've never come across one of these wood-boring beetles. Yet they are all over my bathroom.







Praying mantis

The basic story is this, the lights in our bogs are left on overnight and they attract plenty of insects. (You can increase the efficacy of capture by using insect attracting UV lights). I live a floor off the ground and the canopy is close to our windows, sometimes peering in. The insects that are attracted to the lights here are often from the upper canopy and not the usual ground and undergrowth dwellers. All I do is go look everyday for something interesting. You'd be amazed at what you can get. The moths in the Nat Geo story were entirely from an urban backyard. (That story began in the bogs as well.)

Praying mantis
I keep a few vials and containers handy with me, catch what is interesting and take it to a habitat similar to what it must have come from and then shoot it. The insect goes free, I get some shots. It's pretty much win-win. Off course you're not going to get any big behavior shots this way. But you do get some spectacular animals and portraits are usually tractable with a little knowledge of insect behavior and some gentle coaxing. The insects in this post are all bog-insects!

So go try out your very own canopy access system!

Others in this series: Wildlife secrets parts 1, 2 and 3.

Who's reading this?

I was saving this for some day when I was really exhausted. Today is that day. And for some day when my traffics improved a bit. It has since the wildlife photo secrets posts (1, 2, 3).

So here goes. Tell me who you are? Some of you I know, some personally. I know why some read this site, (p.s. they know me and enjoy watching me make a fool of meself!)

But there are many others, it'd be great to get to know who those readers are. I'd love to know why people read the things I write here, so I can write more of that stuff. And tell me if there's anything you'd like me to be talking about. Tell me which were the completely pointless posts and then be nice and tell me about the ones which were useful to you.

Say hi, willya?

P.S. Sorry to folks who use the feed reader and suddenly have a huge number of posts. They're all old except for this one, I merely added labels to them.

The animal is the environment

This insect, probably a homopteran, a heteropteran, has possibly the best camouflage trick in the world. It layers itself with the environment its in. Invisible under bits and pieces of detritus, wood, insect bodies, blending in completely with the background it can walk around with impunity.

The only clues to its being alive are the facts that it moves and you can just about make out its exposed eyes and antennae.


To enlarge click on the image

Finals

Hmmm, remember that post about that competition I made? Well I'm in the finals :)!!! Winners will be informed June 30th, they usually announce finals results around October. Fingers crossed.