you have all the weapons you need. now fight.

I’ve been loving spotting black crowned night herons in the city as they’ve been busy raising their fledglings in the trees above Lincoln Park Zoo. Had a go at drawing one! 🖤

Fire Eel (Mastacembelus erythrotaenia), family Mastacembelidae, order Synbranchiformes, found in freshwater habitats in SE Asia

This species is not a “true eel”, but is in a group called the spiny eels.

So far I’m really happy with these!

What you'll find - for prev but also anyone interested - is that the faster the moving animal you're trying to photograph the higher the shutter speed gets. I normally shoot birds at 2000-3000 frames per second in order to get sharp feathers in flight, and after a bunch of trial and error anything under about 8000 was just not enough for these little wasps while in flight if I wanted to see detail. They're so fast that even getting these shots required setting my focus distance when they were sitting on the flower, shooting burst, and hoping they took off during the burst.

The reason the ISO is so high is because that lets me use a higher aperture (how wide open the lens is). The narrower the aperture - the higher the F number on the screen - the less light gets in, but the deeper the depth of field is. If you have a shallow depth of field, you get photos like a lot of my early macro attempts... where the nose of an animal facing the camera is in focus but the eyes and ears are not! When you're shooting with a high ISO your images can get really noisy, especially in low light, but I was working in really strong direct sunlight so I had room to mess around with settings. (You can push this too far. I accidentally took a bunch of baby elephant pool wrestling photos on 12000 ISO because I was exhausted and forgot to reset after messing with settings in a really dark reptile house. There's a reason those aren't online.)

I also just want to point out that I am also fairly new at photography overall - I've only really been doing animal photography seriously for the last three years - and that a lot of what will help you get better is trial and error. I have two photography mentors who are both super technical guys and they repeatedly tried to explain the exposure triangle theory to me (the relationship between ISO, aperture, and shutter speed). It never stuck. Y'know what did? Taking a truly astounding number of photos and just messing around with my settings until it started making sense. I shoot with all my settings on manual now, but I absolutely did not start there.

(ISO 100, F11, 1/250)

(ISO 100, F11, 1/250) (dont be fooled, this guy was not actually sitting still)

(okay this ones mainly just here because its funny) (ISO 200, F13(ish, manual aperture ring so some fudgy inbetween value), 1/250)

I only say this because high ISO plus a high aperture is a surefire recipe for fuzzed out photos-- As you raise your aperture value, once you hit the diffraction point, your resolution begins to go down, which when combined with the noise can be a huge pain.

(Though that also depends on your lens. I could get up to F32 on my nikkor without the resolution getting too bad, but F16 and above on my laowa are a pain. Such is life)

The increased clarity of lower ISO can be worth it in my opinion cause you can get stuff like this

Heads up… it’s Fossil Friday! 🦕 The Museum's Apatosaurus, collected at the turn of the 20th century, was the first sauropod ever mounted. But did you know that for years, this mighty dinosaur was displayed with the wrong skull? Using incomplete remains, scientists speculated that Apatosaurus was closely related to another sauropod: Camarasaurus. As a result, a similar skull to Camarasaurus was sculpted and placed atop Apatosaurus’ body (pictured), where it remained for decades. As new research emerged, this reconstruction was updated. To this day, only one Apatosaurus has ever been found with its skull attached!   You can visit Apatosaurus in the Museum’s Hall of Saurischian Dinosaurs. We’re open daily from 10 am–5:30 pm. Plan your visit.

Photo: Image no. 45615 / AMNH Library

⌯ᵔ ⩊ ᵔ⌯⠀Pusheen   Plushies  PNGs   ♡

The depressed teen that hates their parents has been a trope for years. Saying someone has daddy issues or that their behavior is fatherless is an insult. People call kids “ipad babies” and make fun of their short attention span.