Soft?™

not super active, just an enjoyer of memes ❤️

[animentality]

[headspace-hotel]

how does this even fucking happen

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

My garden, with the innumerable herbs and alliums I let flower instead of pulling out, has suddenly acquired a myriad of wasps. They’re mostly solitary species and fairly chill so of course I had to stick a camera in their faces.

So far I’m really happy with these!

These will eventually make their way to the @animalphotorefs repository, once I sort the uh…. Six thousand and seven hundred something bug photos I just took.

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

Oh man I am so pleased with today’s attempt.

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

#jfc 4000 iso...#<- im a beginner. i've never seen iso that high#or shutter speed that fast prev tags from @time-teller

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.

So even as a beginner you too can learn to use ridiculous settings! Find a thing you want to photograph, put the settings where you think they need to be to get what you want. Get enough photos to make you happy, and then change one setting a little bit and try again. I suggest using auto settings where you only have to pick a value for one setting manually and then the camera automatically adjusts the other two for the best photo. Play with a couple adjustments to the same setting on the same subject so you can compare the photos. Over time, it really will start to make sense and come more naturally. And then you can join me in the "your shutter speed was what?" club!

[hawkpartys]

If you want to take higher aperture macro photos without hitting ISO numbers like that, I cannot recommend enough using a flash unit. Even(and honestly especially!) in sunlight. The flash even gives you room to knock the shutterspeed down-- I've gotten beautiful "freeze-frame" shots working at 250.

(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

[woodsdyke]

ptarmigan ridge and park glacier trail, baker-snoqualmie national forest, WA

[herpsandbirds]

Oaxacan Patchnose Snake (Salvadora intermedia), family Colubridae, Oaxaca, Mexico

photograph by Halla Draco Sebastian

[thelovingend-deactivated2025073]

[ur-favorite-fishgirl]

sex is a distraction from your true purpose in life which is to go to the aquarium and look at the fish and go "wooooooaaah.... fishies". cmon guys we all need to lock in.

[plaguedocboi]

So every year, my aquarium does a captive lobster hatchery project (hence all the loblings). The reason we’re doing it is because in the wild, loblings only have a 1 in 25,000 chance of surviving their larval phase. They’re plankton as babies and everything eats them. Additionally, as the Gulf of Maine warms, they are having even lower survival rates because the blooms of copepods they feed on as babies are happening earlier in the year, and they’re missing it.

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

Conservation is so fucken sick

[escuerzoresucitado]

[ceruleanfuckup]

Audio on for exactly the horrible noises you expect

[the-haiku-bot]

Audio on for

exactly the horrible

noises you expect

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[robotalien]

🛸 Websites I like to go on when I'm overwhelmed:

★ neopets wearables try-on ☆ free online music maker ★ fishville simulator ☆ digital pop its ★ papa's games on coolmathgames ☆ background noises for focus ★ old web design museum ☆ online game pony town ★ poptropica ☆ classic animal jam ★ flash transformers games ☆ flash monster high games ★ flash mlp games ☆ flash bratz games ★ flash barbie games ☆ a lot of free online games ★ kid pix studio game ☆ more free online games ★ neopets resources ☆ kirby games ★ online retro games ☆ kirby anime ★ death note ☆ casual desktop game on steam ★ ftp steam games ☆ solitaire ★ puzzle games ☆ color memory game ★ where to watch cartoons (vpn recommended) ☆ more cartoons ★ indie games website ☆ kandi website tutorials and patterns ★ kandi video tutorials

[justraihanah]

COOLIO THANKS

[nitrosplicer]

Fully losing it at this facebook screenshot. 22 inches of green and 1.5 of carrot.

[ortut]

Julian Hooper 1. Introduction, 2016 2. Inevitable conclusion, 2016 (Acrylic on linen)

[certified-door-posts]

certified door post

[archatlas]

Really Big Coin Skrekkøgle

This is our Really Big Coin. It is big because it makes other things look small when photographed next to it. Actually, it is a 20:1 replica of the EUR 50-cent, you see it being milled out here. We needed to do quite a bit of sanding, lacquering and smudging to obtain the desired look and some climbing to get into required shooting position (you need to get up real high to take good pictures). The result is a short series of photographs, attempting to visually scale down real-sized objects.

Images and text via

[aberrantkenosis]

what the fuck

[guerrillatech]

[lemoncat101]

[vintagewildlife]

"I can't believe humans would hunt the thylacine to extinction, humans are fundamentally evil" Hey, did you know that extinction was long thought to be impossible, and within 50 years of humans realizing that extinction via overhunting was a possibility it practically stopped happening? Did you know that humans are so desperate to prevent more losses that they're funneling millions of collective hours and billions of euros into helping other species? Hours and euros that could be spent on humans, and species on whom humanity's own survival does not depend? Did you know that due to an accidental introduction of rats, the Lord Howe Island stick insect population was brought down to 24 individuals and now there are tens of thousands of them?

This bug. This bug that, to most humans, is utterly useless, relatively gross, and completely foreign. Humans saved it because humans do not want to cause another extinction ever again if they can avoid it.

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

heard someone say "who even owns a rolling pin anymore" and my brain froze trying to process it. what does that mean. are u implying rolling pins are outdated technology? did we come up with a shiny new 21st century method of flattening dough of which i remain uninformed? is there now an app on the app store people are using instead??? im losing my mind "who even owns a rolling pin" people who BAKE

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

#kneadless comment

[b1tchcup]

my favorite tweet ever. Every time I go to find it I’m blown away by how few retweets it has