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June 19, 2012
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Alex Wild is an Illinois-based entomologist who studies the evolutionary history of ants. In 2003 he founded a photography business as an aesthetic complement to his scientific work, and his natural history photographs appear in numerous museums, books, and media outlets. Follow on Twitter @myrmecos.
Alex Wild is an Illinois-based entomologist who studies the evolutionary history of ants. In 2003 he founded a photography business as an aesthetic complement to his scientific work, and his natural history photographs appear in numerous museums, books, and media outlets. Follow on Twitter @myrmecos.
I recently got my hands on one of Canon’s finest lenses, the EF 70-200mm 2.8L IS II. The lens is one of those white bazooka-like tubes sometimes spotted along the sidelines at sporting events. Mine, in fact, was purchased to photograph roller derby.
The 70-200 2.8L is, in essence, a giant funnel for photons. It is meant to capture action, at a distance, in relatively low light. As a bug photographer, though, I’ve been experimenting with the lens outside of its comfort zone, focused as close as it can go.
(Yeah, I’m dangerous that way.)
The effect of a wide-open 70-200 2.8L at minimum focus distance is like nothing I’ve seen. Have a look:
A Nephila spider spins her morning web in an Australian rainforest (Cape Tribulation, Queensland, Australia) 1/40sec, f/2.8, ISO 3200
The out-of focus light comprises what’s called “bokeh”, and each lens confers a unique quality related to the configuration of the internal lenses and the shape of the iris. The bokeh from the 70-200 IS 2.8L is so smooth as to resemble a painting!
Here’s another example with the lens stopped down a bit further:
A male bumble bee in the prairie garden (Urbana, Illinois) 1/2500 sec, f/6.3, ISO 1600
If you’re having trouble visualizing what I mean by bokeh, consider the oddly pentagonal backdrop spots from a Canon EF 35mm f/2.0 prime lens:
An Australian Bull Ant (Yandoit, Victoria) 1/160 sec, f/10, ISO 1250
A different lens, a completely different quality to the unfocused backdrop!
About the Author: Alex Wild is an Illinois-based entomologist who studies the evolutionary history of ants. In 2003 he founded a photography business as an aesthetic complement to his scientific work, and his natural history photographs appear in numerous museums, books, and media outlets. Follow on Twitter @myrmecos.
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What's So Hard About Research?![Figure 1. Plot of the locations of the languages in the sample. Dark circles represent languages with ejectives, clear circles represent those without ejectives. Clusters of languages with ejectives are highlighted with white rectangles. For illustrative purposes only. Inset: Lat-long plot of polygons exceeding 1500 m in elevation. Adapted from Figure 4 in [8]. The six major inhabitable areas of high elevation are highlighted via ellipses: (1) North American cordillera (2) Andes (3) Southern African plateau (4) East African rift (5) Caucasus and Javakheti plateau (6) Tibetan plateau and adjacent regions. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0065275.g001](http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/anthropology-in-practice/wp-content/blogs.dir/8/files/2013/06/journal.pone_.0065275.g0011.png "journal.pone.0065275.g001")
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The “oddly pentagonal” highlights from the EF 35mm lens are, of course, the pattern produced by the five-leaf iris of that lens when the background highlights are smeared across the iris opening. If you look closely (especially in the bumblebee photo), you can see that the EF 70-200 produces an octagonal pattern, resulting from the same phenomenon with a different internal lens geometry.
“Bokeh” are just highlights in the background of the image that are rendered out of focus when the lens is close-focused on the foreground. It is the same thing as “lens flare”, except not sharply rendered. “Bokeh” is generally regarded as an aesthetic term – the soft highlights can be very pretty, as you note, and different lenses render them differently – but technically there is nothing “odd” or unexpected about them.
Link to thisI just got my first L… It is the 300 F4, and I love it!
Link to thishttp://farm9.staticflickr.com/8168/7398181616_626c28f375_b.jpg
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