The joys of macro...

Possibly the most rewarding form of photography is macro photography - close-up, detailed telephoto images, capturing the world of the miniature and rendering it large scale for all to see.

Here's an image I took last week of a bumblebee on my rear deck, the first I've seen this year:

Wildlife is a great subject for macro photography, but to get sharp images you need a fast lens, wide aperture and fast shutter speed (if your subject is moving). And stability, to prevent camera shake - so a tripod would seem mandatory. However, I find that macro opportunities arise at the most unpredictable times, and you never have the right kit to hand. None of the macro photographs on this page were taken on a tripod - I compensated by ensuring that the shutter speed, in one hundredths of a second, exceeded the maximum focal length of the lens in millimetres. So, in the case of the bumblebee, I was shooting with a Tamron 70-300mm telephoto lens in macro mode, and set my shutter speed to 1/320th of a second. I shot in raw format, so that I could adjust exposure in post production as necessary.

Often I just have a kit lens to hand, but you can still obtain decent macro images with these. Here's a young newt we found and looked after for a couple of days, before releasing him into the brook at the bottom of the garden:

A bit fogged, but it was shot through the side of a plastic tank with an 18-55mm kit lens. As was my son's "rainbow pilot", here:

Using a wide aperture decreases the depth of field, leaving one small plane of the focal length in focus, and creating a pleasing "bokeh" effect elsewhere in the image (normally the background).

I've experimented with "repurposing" lenses for macro photography. For example, I've  taken a fixed-lens Kowa camera and removed the f/1:1.8 lens and fixed it on an EF mount to fit my Canon. This involved destroying the armature that control the aperture and focusing ring, so I had to wind the lens fully open, and focus by moving the camera nearer or further away from my subject. The focal length is now at 9cm from the sensor, with a depth of field of 1.5 cm. The results of my "McGuyvering", the frankenstein lens, isn't exactly pretty, with all the Superglue, Araldite and rubber glue holding it together, but the results have been good.

Here, a couple of spiders, and my son's Triops:

Of course, you can find lots of inanimate subjects for macro photography, and then you don't have to worry so much about stability*. One of my hobbies is palaentology, and I have amassed quite a collection of fossils, primarily Trilobites. This montage is called Stone Eyes, after the fact that these prehistoric creatures are the only known animals to have, in life, grown their eyes from calcite, much as crystals form their geometric patterns. I hope you enjoy them.

*A tip: get an M6 bolt and attach a non-flexible cord, cut to a length of the distance from the floor to your eyeline. Attach a metal plate or spanner to the other end. Screw the M6 bolt into the tripod mount of your camera. Step on the metal plate or spanner and lift the camera until the cord is taut. Voila! You have a portable tripod you can roll up and put in your pocket!

Photographic postscript to the last entry…

A quick follow-up to yesterday’s post… I went out in the late afternoon and took a few more current photos to illustrate my points.

Rotting hulks:

 Fallen heroes:

 Fell ‘em, lop ‘em, saw ‘em, leave ‘em:

…and some scary sky scenery:

My American friend Dick tells me that in the US, they call these “Widowmakers”. Unnerving stuff. Maybe the Rangers should be clearing these rather than erecting fences and building compost heaps…

On becoming a Woodsman... and a small rant about conservation policy

During our first winter at the cottage, the kitchen/diner and utility rooms were freezing, as the whole ground floor/basement (depends which elevation you look at, we're on a hill) relied on a single radiator for heating, and it had little effect. We'd already invested in an oil Combi boiler (no mains gas around here), and we didn't think adding radiators would be practical or effective (lack of available wall space and lots of glazing). So, last autumn we installed a dual fuel log and coal-fired stove. It didn't come cheap, but it's pretty enough and by golly, it puts out some serious heat!

Unfortunately, to output such heat it uses up an inordinate amount of logs (and/or coal). I soon tired of paying through the nose for petrol station forecourt-purchased logs, kindling and coal, and discovered in short order that foraging dead, fallen branches in the forest is an offence (more on that later in this post). As luck would have it, the publican next door  (did I not mention that we have the good fortune to be right next to a country inn  and Thai restaurant attracting a "neighbour discount" on meals, takeaways and drinks?) had a load of surplus logs from a willow tree he'd had to cut down at one of his other pubs, where its roots were undermining the foundations. Did I want them? Of course! They're over out back, help yourself...

Oof, that was backbreaking work, rolling them down the hill, then manhandling the cords individually across the muddy field before throwing them over the boundary wall into my property. Eventually, though, I had built a couple of decent log piles on the deck at the bottom of the garden.

That should last us a while, once it's seasoned. In the meantime, I've found other smaller supplies of logs through talking to the locals, and the landlord keeps me supplied with wooden pallets to chop up for kindling.

I never thought I'd find myself doing so much woodsman's work! First it's the stacking, seasoning and drying, then the sawing and finally the splitting into stove-appropriate chunks.
 

I suppose it keeps me fit. I've also had to splash out on some specialist equipment, too - an electric chainsaw, a metal sawhorse and chain, a 4 1/2lb logging maul (wedge-shaped splitting axe), a 5lb sledge hammer, and my favourite, a log grenade (almost as much fun as it sounds).

I'm going to have to buy or build a sheltered woodstore up on the deck by the kitchen - currently it's being stacked anywhere that's available - in the drive, in the boiler room, even in Toby's kennel (he never uses it anyway)!

So why don't I go and collect firewood from the forest, then? Because you're not allowed to, that's why. Nor are you allowed to cut anything down (although you could once upon a time - the populace had lopping rights until the late 19th century). Now I'm all for promoting eco-friendly biodiversity, and realise that rotting wood on the forest floor creates a thriving ecosystem for beetles and other burrowing insects and worms. I'm familiar with being out with the kids searching for minibeasts, and carefully rolling over a rotten log and finding a stag beetle larva, recording it, perhaps photographing it before carefully rolling it back.  I also support the ban on mushroom-picking in Epping Forest - this isn't combating the lone picker foraging for some tasty fungi, but the large transit vans that turn up in the early hours with teams of harvesters to clear entire areas of woods and meadows, and sell them to the upmarket restaurants in London.

But there's something sickly about parts of the forest - trees are dying, and collapsing (or being blown down by gales and storms), and the cadavers are left to lay there and rot. Sometimes the forest wardens will saw them up, or even lop an entire tree, but still leave the logs there.

It can be quite daunting walking Toby in those woods sometimes - the trees creak and moan, even when there's no wind. At the slightest squall, you'll find uprooted trees the next morning, their root boles reaching skyward, and a large water-filled clay pit to mark their passing. I recently had a large bough, twenty feet long and about six inches in diameter, come crashing down not more than a couple of feet away from us. Looking up, I saw other detatched branches in the canopy, large and small, supported only by the limbs of their neighbours. And the more trees that fall, the more exposed and threatened the rest become.

There's little or no new growth on the forest floor, because the canopy is artificially dense through the practice of pollarding. Pollarding is a way of lopping, whereby you only lop branches at a height greater than where grazing animals can reach. Lopping promotes new growth, so pollarding ensures that the fresh shoots will grow unpredated. This gives the trees the distinctive appearance of a straight trunk for seven or eight feet, and then a proliferation of main boughs.
 

There's nothing wrong with pollarding - as long as you keep it up. But as I mentioned earlier, lopping rights were rescinded in the late nineteenth century by an act of Parliament (The Epping Forest Act 1878), and these old pollarded trees have been left to grow unchecked, leaving them top heavy and with weakened root systems. This, coupled with the the lack of growth and other root systems in the (mainly clay) earth under the forest floor, makes them vulnerable to being uprooted by storms, such as the ones we've had almost constantly since the end of last year.

And then there's this fencing that's gone up all around the forest, along the many roads that criss-cross it, as well as cattle grids. What's that all about? I don't remember any public information announcements in the local press, but a few enquiries revealed that it was to enclose the herd of cattle that are allowed to roam parts of Epping Forest. Aha! The English Longhorns - I knew about these, a herd of shaggy Neolithic-looking brutes, they were introduced in 2001, numbering about thirty, and were moved around the plains and meadows to graze in the summer months by an old shepherd and his three-legged dog. The herd had grown to about fifty by now. I know they're big buggers with huge side-mounted horns, and you wouldn't want that walking out in front of you as you're doing 50mph up the Epping New Road, but why the need to enclose the forest now? Because they're increasing the herd by a further *three hundred*!
 

That should please the dog walkers, horse riders and mountain bikers no end.

I've estimated that the fencing extends for at least twenty miles around the cordoned areas. You'd have thought they could have used the abundance of local wood to do this - The Warren, just up the road from me, is the base of the Forest Wardens, and they used to maintain a sawmill there (and sold logs to the public), except it's been shut down and dismantled. No, this massive amount of wood has been imported from Scandinavia at great cost. Not to me, I hasten to add - since 1878 Epping Forest (and other green spaces such as Hampstead Heath and Burnham Beeches) has been under the management of the Corporation of the City of London, so none of my tax pounds go to its upkeep. This is fully met by direct taxation on the residents and businesses of the City.

I doubt these beasts will wander far from the open plains where grass is abundant, they really won't prefer leaf mulch, tree bark or saplings, and will leave that to the deer (Muntjac and Fallow).

I really wonder about the guiding principles behind the conservators' decisions, sometimes. But I would say that, wouldn't I? I want those logs.

But I can't have them.