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Part of my work is to photograph pinned insect specimens and I had previously been manually shooting then transferring photos from the SD card to my PC. At work our imaging lab is entirely Canon-based, so I was aware of EOS Utility, Canon’s own remote camera operation software. It wasn’t until I recently went to visit the Paris museum (MNHN) that I worked with Nikon’s Camera Control Pro 2 and realised how much time it would save when organising files if I was using remote photography software.

I started looking at the prices for Nikon remote photography software and Camera Control Pro 2 is fairly expensive, costing around £130 if you buy it from Amazon. Other commercial software was also fairly pricey (NKRemote @ $130), so I looked around for something free.

After a little Googling I found DIYPhotobits.Com Camera Control. It’s completely free and does the job (while using a paltry 373KB of hard drive space)! The interface was so simple that I have already taken photos of two specimens and depth-stacked them (in CombineZP). This means I can now remotely control my camera and produce depth-stacked images using free software :)

Here is an example of Zopherosis georgei (Coleoptera: Zopheridae) that I took today:

I was sent a link today for a Brownewell Photography which specialises in 360° photography, including taking photos of type specimens. The previews on the site are composed of 20-30 photographs to give the illusion of 360°, which works well enough. You are given rotational control of the photos through Flash, as opposed to some other 360° images which use GIFs that you cannot control.

A quick search for 360 degree photography came up with a site (Red Door VR) which sells photographic turntables that had “click stop” intervals. They also recommended the program Object2VR to produce panoramas with Flash-based controls.

I think we will start to see more of these panoramic specimen images, although the major constraint will be the time it takes to produce them.

At work (and soon at home) I will be taking many depth stacked insect images from both a microscope and using a macro lens. Whilst I have a ring flash for the camera, I need a constant light source for the microscope, so I’ve started thinking and searching for a cheap LED ring light. My target price is under £50.

I remember seeing some fluorescent and white LED ring lights at an entomological fair and thinking they were rather expensive. The cheapest ring lights were the fluorescent ones, costing about £30 each. The LED rings were more, costing over £50. A quick Google search brings up a ring light for a Marumi compact camera ring light for £40 (RRP £77.62!) which still seems expensive and I don’t know how it attaches or if it would fit a microscope. Further searching turns up some in-car lights which could be adapted and an  LED microscope light which does exactly what I want (AC power, adjustable lighting and thumb screws) but costs a mere £500 and is not for sale in the UK.

DIY Ring Light © fdecomite

I am beginning to think I’ll need to build one… Any ideas?

I am a fan of Flickr and think it’s a wonderful place to store and tag photos. Recently I’ve been wondering about how useful Flickr is as an entomological resource and thought of a few questions:

• How many new insect photos are being added daily?
• How common are misidentifcations?
• How many insect photographers add geographic data (geotags)?
• What is the number of unique insects represented on Flickr?
• How could Flickr be used in an insect-based meta-analysis?

As I wrote this there were (searching everyone’s uploads with no filter):

• 839,123 results for ‘insect’
• 28,014 results for ‘hemiptera’
• 1,673 results for ‘pentatomidae’
• 816 results for ‘palomena prasina’

Flickr map of Palomena prasina © Yahoo 2009

I found that there have been around 1,000 extra hits for insect everyday in the past week and that searching for ‘palomena prasina on the Flickr map gave ~217 results (depending on the type of sort) which were spread around the UK, France, northern Spain, Germany, Finland, Belgium and the Netherlands.

As I browsed through general search results for the Palomena prasina photos, I saw a few that were obvious misidentifications. I think that misidentifications are probably the biggest limiting factor that would be hard to control if you wanted to use Flickr tags/information in an academic way. Whilst there are plenty of very knowledgeable Flickr entomologists, it’s hard to know which photos are identified correctly.

Whilst the map search was interesting, it wasn’t overly useful in it’s basic form. I think that a more sophisticated map search might be possible using of the Flickr API, but you would still be limited by the proportion of images that have geographic data.

Finally, everyone tags and organises their photos differently. I try and enter in as much information as I can without it being too long or bothersome. For an insect shot I try and include: country, county, area name, specific location (like the nature reserve), class, order, family and genus+species. By doing this I can search for particular insects in different areas quite easily. I started added a few six-figure grid references to the images, but as every specimen has a map location, this isn’t a priority for me.

I feel that Flickr could be used in a more powerful way and have a few ideas how, but I’ll save that for another post.

For now, why not check out some of the Flick insect groups? I’ve linked a few below:

• British Bees, Wasps and Ants
• British Beetles
• British Bugs
• British Flies
• British Lepidoptera
• Fly Day Friday
• UK Orthoptera

These photos are slightly delayed because I formated my computer over the weekend, replaced some parts and switched from taking jpegs to raw images. The aquisition of a larger capacity memory card and hard drive has meant that storage space is less of a concern, at least for now!

I posted the bee photos on Flickr a few days ago, hoping that some of my contacts would help with identifications, which they did – thanks Tristan.

I saw two species of Adrena but have yet to identify them, and one species of bumblebee, Bombus terrestris. Aside from some Diptera, this was all that I encountered.

Andrena sp. on lesser celandine. This was a very small bee, around 5-7mm.

Another Andrena sp. (male). There were a lot of these in the same place, on the bark of the tree and around the surrounding earth. At one point there were over ten of them.

If the weather is good tomorrow I will visit Langdon Hills again.

I recently came across Beetles in the Bush, an excellent entomology blog written by Ted MacRae. I particularly liked the use of taxonomic post categories to organise families into their respective orders and will start using it in my blog because it’s such a good idea.

Earlier this week I finished organising my insect records from last year in Excel. I was thinking about putting them into Access because it’s much better suited for such data and I may start building an Access database over the weekend. Another thought occurred to me, which was that there must be some freely available programs, perhaps some which can make use of Google Maps/Earth and Flickr. Do you know of any?

Finally, a little bit of eye candy:

Red and Black Shield Bug - This pentatomid caught my eye amongst unidentified material collected in Ecuador. © The Natural History Museum

I have been meaning to try and make a focus stacked image after being inspired by some of Lord V’s photos and his various photo stacking guides for the freely available CombineZ programs, made by Alan Hadley.

A focus stacked image is a composite image with a better depth of field, made by combining images taken at different focal distances.

Orellana nigriplaga (depth stacked image)

This image is the result of combining the images below.

Preparatory images for depth stacking

I would recommend trying CombineZP, especially if you work with something like pinned specimens. I will be posting some more depth stacked images soon and might experiment with some landscape images.

This specimen is part of The Natural History Museum collection and was taken for a research request. © The Natural History Museum

I took my first spring insect photos today after seeing a queen bumblebee flying around the garden. There were quite a few hoppers about, one of which I photographed:

Stenocranus minutus (Hemiptera: Delphacidae)

I’m hoping to go out and catch one because I can’t quite get enough detail in a photo, but I will be getting a new (macro) lens which should help when taking photos of small insects! I had a look on the British Bugs site but didn’t see anything which had the black mark on the wing (until Joe identified it for me on Flickr!).

Tonight’s episode of QI (now in the “F” series) had a flora and fauna theme, of which one of the topics was flea circuses. I had always thought that flea circuses were mechanical and did not use fleas, but Stephen Fry has dispelled me of my ignorance! It seems that this is a common misconception and that flea circuses did use live fleas, although there were some mechanical “flea circuses” too.

I’ve been reading some blogs and came across two interesting posts and two new blogs:

A Cybertaxonomy Discussion: Vince Smith has posted a blog response to concerns a fellow taxonomy blogger (Roderic Page) has with Scratchpads, the online taxonomy database used by Vince & the NHM, and the potential for redundant data and time wasting when trying to gather information from multiple Scrathpads. Instead, Page sugguests using Semantic MediaWikis which would be able to deal with human-language queries on bulk taxonomic/entomological information, such as “Which Hemiptera might I find in Essex during July?” or “How many beetles are there excluding weevils?”.

Whilst I don’t want to reiterate the posts, I am inclined to agree with Vince’s view from my experience with taxonomists/entomologists at museums and people who are happier working with paper rather than computers. With so much taxonomic information not readily accessible in any form I think Scratchpads & similar more traditionally organised databases will become more commonly used before the more (conceptually) advanced Semantic MediaWikis.

Scanning Moths: There are some excellent scanned images of moths over at cicindela,  which have even managed to capture individual scales at a reasonable resolution!

I’d recommend visiting cicindela as the author as plenty of other good photographs.

Cincindela and iPhylo have been added to the blogroll.