My eight year old son loves scorpions. He also loves Justin Bieber; and has been following my efforts to create a blog with great interest. So he has asked me, very nicely, to write a blog about both Justin Bieber AND scorpions…
This has presented something of a challenge as you might have guessed. I don’t have access to any photos of scorpions taken by Justin Bieber; nor do I have any pictures of Justin Bieber with a scorpion. And needless to say, I don’t have any macro photos of Justin Bieber. [A site that exhibited close-up photos of various bits of his anatomy would probably be pretty darn successful. Just imagine: see all of Justin one square centimetre at a time! Umm…well…maybe not…].
The best I could come up with is a blog about some scorpion photos that WEREN’T taken by Bieber. The problem (yes another problem) is that I don’t have any good recent photographs of scorpions. This is somewhat embarrassing because I too love scorpions. But somehow I haven’t gotten around to taking any really good photographs of any for a very long time.
However, I have thousands of 35mm slides in storage and recently took a few to get scanned and digitized. I was curious to see what the quality would be like for possible use on this blog. It so happens that this group of slides included a few scorpion photos that I had taken more than 20 years ago.
Unfortunately, I am not really thrilled with the results of the scans. I expected some increased contrast, but the resolution isn’t what I had hoped for. On the other hand it is interesting to see how much my photographic skills have improved. To be honest I don’t really feel these images meet the standards I am trying to set for this site, but I suppose they have historical value. Besides, I have a young son to accommodate…
The first photo below is a close-up of a Florida bark scorpion (Centruroides gracilis) eating a cricket. The second is a close-up photo of a Hentz striped scorpion (Centruroides hentzi), also eating a cricket. It was clearly a bad day for crickets the day I took these pictures! Back then these two scorpions shared an enclosure on my desk at work. It really didn’t seem odd to any of the people I worked with then. I suppose that says as much about them as it does me…
The last photo is a specimen of Vaehovis From Arizona. These scorpions aren’t big or dangerous, but they have a lot of attitude! They definitely won’t hesitate to sting, as you can see from the photo. It is really unfortunate that the tip of the sting is lost in the shadow of the pebble in the background. And that is a good example of how my approach to photography has changed since I moved to digital. Back when I was still shooting film I had no idea how the image was going to turn out until after the film was developed. My modus operandi was to take a series of photos while bracketing the exposure widely to be sure that at least one shot was exposed correctly. I tended to take my time to try and focus carefully because each wasted photo was wasted money (film wasn’t cheap). In the case of this photo, by the time I got the film back is was too late to re-shoot, and so I just had to accept it as it was. Now of course I can check a photo moments after taking it. My usual process is to take one or two quick photos to set the exposure. And then I can take as many photos as I like with my attention focused solely on composition. If a critter is moving around a lot, I can bang some “guess” shots in hopes that I will catch the right focus. If I don’t, there is nothing lost. As I have said in earlier posts, it isn’t unusual for me to take 30 or 40 pictures to try and get just the right image. But I shoot in small batches, and will often upload pictures to my laptop periodically so that I can take a very close look in an effort to fine-tune the composition. It’s really amazing how things have changed…
The technical stuff (boy does this take me back!):
Camera: Olympus OM-4 SLR
Lens: Zuiko 50mm F2.8 + extension tube
Settings: F16 @ 1/60 sec
Lighting: Vivitar 283 with vari-power module
Film: Fujichrome 50asa or 100asa
Dear Justin Bieber: if you are reading this blog and have ever taken a picture of a scorpion, could you please pass a copy along? It would make an eight year old immensely happy…