Since writing about the photo-taking spree, I thought that maybe it would be a thing to share some of my tips with you, regarding taking photographs of objects... just in case. Right?

First of all - if you are planning to take photos in a museum (which for most of us will be the most common thing), make sure that you are allowed to do so. Museums normally do not allow the use of flash, and often the use of a tripod is also forbidden. You might get allowed that if you ask nicely, and explain what you want to have the photos for. Make sure you know the museum's wishes on whether the pictures may be shared, or published, and under what conditions.

When taking photos, using the flash is out because of the potential of light damage to objects, especially textiles. It's also not much use anyways, as the glass cases will reflect the light, rendering your picture unhelpful.

So. Ideally, you want to have a camera that can do raw photos (digital negatives), and have a "fast lens". I've had good results with tuning exposure down in the general settings, going for slightly to considerably underexposed pictures, then upping exposure in the post-production. A dark picture can be lightened, but a blurry picture stays blurry. Some modern lenses and cameras offer a stabilising mode - that can definitely help.

Sometimes you can get away with actually touching the lens to the glass of the case (not all museums will suffer you to do this, and I've been told off for it more than once); that helps to stabilise these always-shaking hands that humans have. If you may use a tripod, do. In that case, a remote control for taking the photos is a good thing, otherwise your tripod might still vibrate from your pressing the button.

Try to keep your lens parallel to the object, so you can have a good depth of field; that is especially important if you are using a zoom lens or macro lens.

Using a white balance gadget can save you a good bit of time in processing your images afterwards.

Take a lot of pictures. And then some more. Thanks to digital photography, that is not costing an arm and a leg anymore as it used to in the times of analog film, so maybe invest in one or two good, fast storage cards extra and then click away.

Finally, and possibly the most important bit of advice: Make sure you'll know afterwards what you did take pictures of! When I'm doing museum photography, I always, always make sure to take a picture of the explanatory plaque as well; that holds the description of the piece and its inventory number. When I sort my images, I add that number to the description text in my photo database together with, duh, the name of the museum (which is usually not on the plaque...) - and if there are copyright or publishing restrictions on the photo, I make a remark of that as well.

Any thing that you have found especially helpful (or not helpful) when taking photos in museums, or in research situations? Let me know!

Here's some more from the Not-Lawn-Photosafari... including some scenes of life and death. Literally.

[caption id="attachment_5454" align="alignnone" width="508"] Some kind of Hylaeus bees, in German Maskenbienen, mating. Why there are three of them? I don't know, and they didn't tell.


So much for the life - there were other dramatic things happening, too:

[caption id="attachment_5451" align="alignnone" width="428"] A wasp in a fight with a bee of some kind, probably trying to get some food for her young. (Both of them, in fact, were probably trying to get some food, but only one will go home successfully...)


And now for some calmer scenes:

[caption id="attachment_5453" align="alignnone" width="428"] Some kind of wasp, as yet unidentified. There's lots of wasp-like insects with a red and black abdomen, as I've learned! It was about 3 cm in length, so fairly huge.


There's not just the humming sound of bees and other flying insects outside, too. There's also the lovely sound of grasshoppers making their "music", and I managed to get one of them banned onto digital "film":



I didn't even try to find out what genus or species that one is, but I absolutely adore the patterning on the legs and body. A very beautiful guy (or girl?)!

Today's not much going on outside, bee-wise, as it's raining. Finally! Hopefully there will be enough water coming down during the day to refill our rain barrel, which was almost empty with all the watering of the potted plants. It's still too dry anyways for the time of year - another sign of the climate change. Sigh.

Good news, though: Yesterday was sunny and nice, and I did manage to take a few photos of the aforementioned red-listed little bee. No glorious photos, but decent enough to tell that it really is Andrena hattorfiana:



You can tell the species by the colouring of the abdomen - and the fact that the lady is gathering nectar and pollen from a specific flower genus, the Knautia flowers. Which happen to grow on our not-lawn...

Here's a second shot of the bee:



And as a bonus, an European peacock (Aglais io):



Actually it's two of them, one with closed wings is sitting right on top of the summer lilac flower.

The not-lawn is in blooming season now - almost all the wild thyme has flowers, and they are very much appreciated by a gazillion of flying insects. Which, to my great dismay, means that I actually have to wear shoes when crossing the not-lawn, or use the paved garden path, and keep to the more trodden-down other paths without bloom when going to the paved section. I got stung twice within a good week, even though I was walking very slowly and carefully, one wasp, one bee or probably bumble-bee. That is a good indicator of there being many more insects in our garden than last year, as I walked barefoot all year then and didn't get stung once!

Since I dislike wearing shoes at home, and the garden counts as "home", this does annoy me... but I can accept it due to the joy the number of bees, flies, wasps, grasshoppers, and butterflies the not-lawn brings. I even spotted one special bee that's on the red list, though I didn't manage to take a photo of it (yet).

There are some other beasties I did manage to get decent pics of, though:

[caption id="attachment_5441" align="alignnone" width="640"] Male Gallische Feldwespe (European Paper Wasp), polistes dominula. Note the yellow eyes!


That was the first time we saw one of these; that guy was quite a bit larger than the ladies of the same species, which can be identified nicely by their long, orangey legs that hang down when they fly. It's one of the many wasp species that are entirely unattracted by meat or cake; they are also far less aggressive than "the" wasp Vespula germanica.

Next up: A very distinctive ass.

[caption id="attachment_5439" align="alignnone" width="567"] Gelbbindige Furchenbiene, Great Banded Furrow bee, Halictus scabiosae.


The furrow on the abdomen is what gives the name to this kind of bee. They're a rather frequent kind of wild bee.

Next one is not a bee, but a kind of fly masquerading as a dangerous sting-posessing animal:

[caption id="attachment_5438" align="alignnone" width="902"] Probably Eristalis pertinax, a quite common kind of hoverfly.


Last one is one I haven't managed to identify yet - because there's oh-so-many different kinds of wild bees and other flying insects here in Germany. I'm actually content to roughly identify them (as in down to the genus, not necessarily the species, and not even considering the sub-species), but, well, with about 600 different species of wild bees in Germany... Sad thing, though: About half of this number is on the list of endangered species, as they are quite specific about their habitat or food plants. Which is one of the reasons I will handle wearing shoes to cross the not-lawn (and do it as little as possible).

So here's my unidentified red-ass-bottomed, ass-lifting little wild bee:



If someone happens to know what it is, please tell me!

And for the German readers among you, here's one of the many pages about wild bees in Germany, with some basic info. There'll probably be a few more posts about these small flying guys, as I'm entirely fascinated by them, and I quite enjoy going on photo safari with the macro lens!

Talk Like A Pirate Day is drawing nearer again (September 19!), and that is a good reason to pull out the Pirate Robert hats again and take some more photos - especially since the hat pattern is going to be featured in an article soon (and I'm utterly excited about that!).

Some things, though, are notoriously hard to take good photos of. Gold embroidery, or gold brocading, for instance - the glittering gold has a tendency to mess with the exposure time calibration of cameras, and this tends to result in really bad pictures.

While knitted hats are usually not suffering from exposure time problems due to gold thread, small cables also have a tendency to look really obvious in real life, just to suddenly and quietly disappear into invisibility on a photograph. Human eyes and human brains are just really, really good at seeing 3D and making the most even of small differences of light and shade.

So I was very happy about having two nice little photo lights, and a good tripod, and some time for fiddling. And some more time for fiddling. Then some more. There were also some, um, alternative supports for the two photo lights so that I could adjust them juuust so - a few millimetres, or a few degrees of the head angle, already made a huge difference in the outcome.

[caption id="attachment_3367" align="alignnone" width="816"] Lamps, a styrofoam head with the hat, a camera on a tripod. And some motivational coffee (not shown).


In the end, though, I did get a few decent pictures - so I'd say the fiddling was well worth it!

Part of category "fun things I get to do under cover of my day job": filming. In the most current case, filming a short explanatory video about the oil light swimmers that I carry in the shop - to show when I'm at fairs.

I'm still completely delighted with the fact that a company in Nuremburg has been making these oil light swimmers for way more than a hundred years. I absolutely love using them as the eco-friendly (and cheap!) alternative to tea lights. No aluminum waste, no pricey beeswax tealights, and there's vegetable oil in the kitchen anyways, so also no extra space required.

The concept of this kind of lighting, though, has been out of common use and knowledge for so long that the little round and tri-bladed thingies need a lot of explanation when they sit on the table in my market stall - so I've played with the idea of making a bit of an explanatory video for a good while now. Finally, this has happened, and it ate most of yesterday's work time.

Just like taking good photos of things, it's not as easy as it seems to take a good video of things. It can be astonishingly hard to keep everything inside the frame - good thing I've been doing theatre stuff before, so I knew about the magic that can be wrought by a few bits of tape at key places.

[caption id="attachment_3366" align="alignnone" width="451"] Video setup. It's not looking very spectacular, is it?


Also there was a problem with the SD card I used in the first go, so I got to take all the shots again. Sigh. Now the video-ing part is all done, and only (hah!) the cutting and text-setting part remains - which will hopefully not take a lot longer, so I can take the video along to Bielefeld...

I'm not entering a title, though. I'm not. Because today is somehow... weird. I did manage to get a stack of stuff done, most of it in preparation for the next fairs, but I'm still feeling way behind, and would have liked to be much, much faster. Story of my life.

Parts of that stack of stuff done today include:

Updating and printing my spinning instructions. (While the downloadable version is available for free through my shop, you get the printed-out instructions in the spinning kit, so I need to print some more from time to time).

Getting together with Gillian for a chat - we're planning a crossover blog interview in celebration of the Beast's release as paperback, and it was my turn to get interviewed. I'll have the pleasure of pestering Gillian with questions next week, and you will see the results here on the blog.

Taking photos of the oil lights in action. I'm still totally in love with these things - they have been produced for ages (the three-bladed swimmer has been made, unchanged, since 1808) and they are just so incredibly nice to use, both for atmospheric lighting and for keeping your tea hot. However, the concept of using these swimmers is rather forgotten today, so people often stand in front of the swimmers at my table, looking puzzled. So I obviously need some explanatory thing to sit around on my stall table at a fair - and this, also obviously, needs photographs.

[caption id="attachment_2574" align="alignleft" width="265"] Atmospheric lighting. With a wineglass, a bit of water and some oil... and the swimmer, of course.


[caption id="attachment_2580" align="alignright" width="265"] Keeping tea hot. Because life is better with tea, and tea is better when hot. Obviously, right?


Actually that was the main bits I did today, as these things all tend to eat up more time than you'd guess at first. (Photos, in particular. Never underestimate the amount of time needed to take good photos - especially if they involve tricky lighting conditions. Or gold embroidery.) The rest was eaten up by the usual day-to-day things such as sorting out emails and working on the current paper/presentation projects. And having coffee. Plus tea. Tea was obligatory since I had to take teapot warmer pictures!