IHSAN KHAIRIR

Walking along the brook in Batang Kali, I couldn’t help but notice the spiders that made the wet, splashy riverside environment their home.

This spider lives on a piece of branch that fell from a tree into a river. This tree branch is right in the middle of the river; most of the branch is underwater and the spider made the part of the branch that is above the water its home. I was thinking about why this spider chose such dangerous site for a dwelling, since the water can easily sweep the spider away and drown it should the branch shift position or move due to the raging current or  outside interference by humans or animals.

You can see how risky this location is for the spider; the rushing water is just a few inches away.

This is a very small spider that made its home at the end of a very tall grass reed that grows on the river bank and extends into the middle of the river. It seems that the area above the surface of the river is a good place to catch insects that breed in the river or habitually fly over the river surface (such as damselflies and mosquitoes).

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I still have some pictures of other riverside little creatures that I’d like to share, so I hope you enjoyed this installment of spider photos

The day after February 14th, we went for a family getaway in Batang Kali, Selangor where my uncle owns a piece of hillside land that includes a brook / river creek and a riverside shack.

Most of the family, after having breakfast, went for a dip in the brook and literally stayed there till evening. I joined them for a bit before grabbing my camera and traversed along the brook looking for small creatures to shoot. And I got a few that I liked.

Dragonflies Mating

I saw a pair of dragonflies flying around, one chasing the other, so I followed them until they stopped and landed on a blade of grass. The dragonfly in front started to attach the tip of its abdomen on the neck of the second dragonfly.

After that, the second dragonfly attached its abdomen tip onto the underside of the first dragonfly…

Hard to say which one’s male and which one’s female. I’d say the one behind is male. Notice that they form a kind of heart shape in the process. The nymphs are conceived in love!

The Mating Water Striders

Capturing any decent pictures of the water striders was really hard. I had a hard time focusing on any of them due to the small size, the amazingly clear water (made the AF focus on the objects in the water) and their superfast and sudden movements. I spotted an extraordinarily large one which wasn’t as fast as the others, and it wasn’t until I took a picture that I realized it wasn’t a large water strider, it was a pair of water striders mating!

You can kind of see how the weight of the both of them bend the surface tension of the water.

They also dance along the surface of the water while they’re at it!

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I have more pictures of other brookside insects, but let me save those for another post. In the meantime, I hope you enjoyed this one as much as I enjoy sharing them with you.

I was alone in the office (yet again) a few days ago so I hunted on the net for some photography ideas. Then I came across a forum that was discussing waterdrop / droplet shots, so I decided to try my hand at freezing falling drops of water.

So here they are, numbered and titled. I think that I should start titling my shots to give it more value and meaning, and also to make it easier for people to refer to.

Which ones do you like the most?

#1 – The Sinking Bowling Pin

#2 – The Young Thought Bubble

#3 – The Dying Maelstrom

#4 – The Bigheaded Chess Pawn

#5 – The Hungry Water Hole

#6 – Casper Looking for a Friend

#7 – The Suicidal Obese

#8 – William Tell’s Target Practice

#9 – Nessie Comes Out to Play

#10 – Tilt Twenty-Three and a Half Degrees

#11 – Bob Wins an Award

#12 – Flaring Cold Fusion

Titling these shots was much harder than taking them!

EDIT:


Taking these shots require good timing and definitely a DSLR. This is because a DSLR have less to no shutter lag so you can time your shots right. Using a compact point and shoot camera is still possible, but you have to really know the timing of your camera’s shutter lag and take the picture a bit earlier than the water drop.


I used small apertures (f/11, f/16, f/20) for these shots for larger depth of focus. All of them were shot at 1/200s shutter speed. Slower shutter speeds will result in blurring due to subject movement (the water drops and splashes) and camera shake (unsteady hands, unless using a tripod). Since the fastest response time for my flash is 1/200 seconds, I had to use that shutter speed to freeze the shot. A faster shutter speed will result in the flash firing after the shot was taken , which serves no purpose.


A pro would use manual focus and a tripod but I used AF (autofocus) and handheld the camera. I held a plastic spoon at the exact location where the water will drop and lock the AF, remove the spoon and timed my shot and pressed the shutter exactly when the water drop reaches the pool of water in the mug. It took quite a number of shots, and the 12 shots above are the ones I really liked.

So many friends and family tying the knot this month. If I were to go to all the weddings I’m invited to, I’d have four or five free buffet lunches every weekend for the whole month.

Just this last week, I went to three out of four friends’ weddings, the one I missed was because the reception was too far away and going there meant that I’d have to miss the other three. Sorry Ayu, I know you had a wonderful time anyways!

Speaking of tying the knot, here I’d like to share with you a (not so) recent photo I took of a knot.

Care to guess what that is?

An electrical cord?

A wire cable?

A fishing line?

Actually, it’s a strand of hair.

A strand of hair, knotted in the middle.

No it’s not my hair, because it’s quite long in its entirety. I found it on a white tiled floor, so I used an off-camera flash and reversed my lens to get a closeup shot of the knot on the hair.

It was my first time getting a closeup shot of a strand of hair, so getting it in focus manually wasn’t that easy. I had to make sure no wind was blowing so that the hair wouldn’t move, so I had to turn the fan off. The room was small and cramped and the windows face east so it was hot without the fan blowing. I only took a few shots until I was satisfied with the results, and then turned the fan on, causing the strand of hair to be blown away and disappear.

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On another note, it feels great to be back to blogging again; I haven’t been blogging for a week and felt so at unease that I had to resume my regular postings today, even though I still have much to do work-wise.

Are you glad that I’m back blogging? I hope you do. Because I’m looking forward to hearing from you all again!

I am glad that I discovered my interests in photography. Ever since I started picking up the camera, especially so since I got my Nikon D60, I realized that I paid more attention to the oft missed world of the minuscule. Those of you who have been with my blog for a while would know how much I like taking pictures of small creepy crawlies (to the delight and also dismay of some). My hobby has opened my eyes to the almost invisible, mostly ignored, and largely unnoticed minute details in the world around us. Sometimes I feel sad that most of us would miss seeing the beauty in the small things. We can discover a lot from viewing the most mundane things up close. And sometimes, creatures we regard as creepy or ugly can reveal their true beauties when we scale ourselves down to their size and try to see them eye to eye.

I was walking around in my apartment when I almost stepped on this little green caterpillar. It wasn’t a big squishy caterpillar that one might find featured as a grub delicacy in some foreign place. It was pretty small, less than an inch long and definitely thinner than a satay stick. I picked it up from the white tile floor and set it on a thin stack of white paper. And of course, I ran over to the trusty ol’ camera bag and grabbed my arsenal to shoot this little bug.

The little bugger was hard to photograph. It kept moving and wriggling and turning its head to different directions (probably trying to find its way to the edge of the paper). Because I used the reverse lens technique, the caterpillar’s movement meant that it gets out of focus easily, and I had difficulty keeping it in focus. Out of the many, some are pretty decent and shareable. One of them is this side profile of the caterpillar. To tell you the truth, I’m not even sure where the eyes of this caterpillar were. What I noticed is that it’s got some strands of hair sticking out from various parts of its body including the head. The hair strands were sparsely distributed, unlike other hairy caterpillars. Maybe this was a youngin’, soon it’ll grow a full body of hair and closeup fanatics like me would keep away from it for a change.

Here’s one where you can see the ‘face’ of the caterpillar. I still am not sure where its eyes were.

Another perspective on how small this caterpillar was: you can actually see the thin side of the white paper for size reference. The white paper was a normal printing paper. Grab a printing paper and look at its thickness. Now look at the picture. You’ll get a rough sense of the size of the caterpillar and how small it was.

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I suddenly am reminded of the story where King Solomon’s (Sulaymaan A.S.) troops were passing through the Wadi Naml (the valley of the ants, if I’m not mistaken) and how the King made sure his troops would avoid stepping on the small insects. This story tells us to appreciate the lives of Allah’s creatures no matter how small. And that collateral deaths, no matter how insignificant the people/creatures killed may seem to be, should be avoided to our best efforts.

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Have a wonderful day, everyone! Hope you liked the pics. And sorry to those who don’t.