ruined images

my absence

i'm not dead, i swear! this summer has just been rough for me to go out and do photography in, mostly due to my heat sensitivity (which sucks because spring and summer are my favorite seasons). but yesterday was the perfect opportunity to go into the woods and take some pics of nature. temperatures were actually autumn-levels, for once, and there were some neat things going on with a few areas of the reservation i was visiting. but in this post specifically, i wanted to highlight the bumblebees i came across.

the bees

i came across these bumblebees in a mad dash to fill up their pots for their queen larvae for the winter. bumblebee workers will die at the first frost, generally, and thus ramp up their collection efforts during late summer/early autumn. as a result, their movement speed was much, much faster and more purposeful than their late winter/early spring lazy sauntering, so it took a long time to get the pics framed well and in-focus. the last pic in this collection is especially blurry, but i think it's kinda funny and highlights how quickly they were moving. i probably should have upped the shutter speed but it was a precarious place on a bridge off the trail where there was a lot of foot traffic. so i just kinda raw-dogged it as best i could so i wasn't in the way for too long. but even still, most of the pics, i think, came out pretty well and only needed minimal post-processing to account for the overcast day. i didn't really need to sharpen anything for clarity, just upped some exposure on the images.

but aside from that, there's other reasons i wanted to highlight these little guys.

the honeybee problem

in the USA (and presumably north america in general), there has been a huge push to "save the bees" over the past 5-10 years. this is a great campaign as bees were (and still are) facing challenges with various environmental issues. but the "general public version" of the campaign (in other words, what talking points were highlighted to convey the issue to joe schmo) seemed to stack the deck in favor of saving or focusing on the feral european honeybees rather than native bee species in the USA and north america.

i'm sure there are reasons for this. honeybees are a commodity on top of being important pollinators. the first thing people think of when they hear "bees" tends to be the honey-making variety. there's some self-interest there, i would assume, since a lot of people like honey and the idea of no longer being able to acquire honey is probably just as upsetting for some as the other effects loss of pollinators can have.

i was going to make a big informative post about this on my main blog ( @godtier ) but i put it on hold due to being busy with other matters IRL. this post isn't meant to be that big informative thing (mostly because i dumped this info in a read more rather than the main post) but just a real quick primer for those unaware:

"wild" honeybees are feral animals in NA. they're the equivalent of cows and pigs bred for farming, as they've been domesticated over hundreds of years

much like other feral domesticated species, feral honeybees can cause damage to native wild species via over-consumption of resources

native NA bees, such as carpenter bees and bumblebees, don't tend to have massive hives; carpenters are solitary while bumblebee nests/hives cap out at a few hundred. compare to european honeybees whose hives can have thousands

larger hives = more required resources, which can push out native bee species

native bees are (unsurprisingly) more efficient at pollinating NA-native crops, like squash. honeybees cannot effectively pollinate squash flowers, for example, because they do not have the mechanisms through which to extract nectar/pollen that native bees do

while honeybees do provide a "service," their ease of rearing makes them appealing to people who want to "help nature." this is an effect of their domestication making them easy to raise

by contrast, it's much harder to rear bumblebees, for example, as their hive structure is vastly different from that of honeybees

most native bees are seasonal species whose workers (if they have a community hive structure) die off around the time of the first frost

bumblebees are objectively cuter than honeybees [citation needed]

anyway, i may still post that big post on my main blog in the future, but this was about all i had energy for at the moment. if you live in NA, consider the humble bumble (among others bees, but they're harder to rhyme) when it comes to setting up a pollinator garden come spring. look into native flowering plants in your area, rather than ones that will only attract honeybees or just look pretty. talk to a garden center or nature center near you for information on what to plant in your garden. see if you can leave little piles of leaves or twigs/dirt that won't be disturbed so the bees can make their nests. the bees will thank you.

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this is another photo taken when my sx-70's pick-arm was malfunctioning. on top of that, it was a 90+ degree F day, which caused the film in the bay of the camera to expand.

as a result, it came out oddly exposed and partially damaged. the exposure ring on the camera was set to one stop lower than center, due to the extremely bright sunlight that day, but you wouldn't think that by looking at it. in reality, the sun was beating down directly on top of us (we were in an area of the swamp that had a clearing so there was no tree coverage/shade) and the scene was actually fairly well-lit.

when using a polaroid, if the sunlight is oppressive, i tend to set the exposure to a -1 to start. the sx-70 land camera has a dial rather than a slider mechanism that would be used on later polaroid cameras. but it's pretty clear what setting you're on because the dial has a small notch in it to show where "neutral exposure" is. mine was set just slightly less of neutral, and yet the picture came out so dark with a bright sky.

i'm chalking it up to the damaged film screwing up the pick-arm's calculations for the height of the exposure. the expanded chemicals probably made it a millimeter or two too high, thus the pick-arm was pressing the exposure up against the mirror, and in turn, making the rollers have to work harder to compress and spread the chemicals across the exposure. it certainly made a horrible mechanical sound when this picture was taken that scared the shit out of me lol.

furthermore, the sx-70 land camera has an entirely metal body and the film was newly purchased. why does that matter? well, present-day polaroid cannot make the exact same formula that was used from the 70s to the early 00s due to a bunch of regulations i won't get into. as a result, i do think whatever mixture they used was primarily developed with the assumption that it would be used in plastic-body cameras, which don't get as hot.

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this picture was taken using a polaroid onestep2 with a lens attachment that i bought off of ebay.

polaroid used to sell a similar effects attachment but discontinued it (the onestep2 is no longer produced despite being one of the best modern box cameras you can buy), so some dude on ebay recreated them with a 3D printer and some carefully cut clear plastic.