Robberfly
Tim Eisele sent me this picture a few months ago, and I’m glad it got lost in the shuffle because I wanted to talk about him today. But first, he has this to say about the bug:
This robber fly was hanging out on our mulberry bush in June. My wife
broke off the branch and brought it in the house to be photographed, and
at first I thought it had died it a lifelike pose. Then, after about a
dozen pictures, it flew off.
As usual, Tim gets amazing shots and provides good ID. What more could I ask for? I mean, besides the cool bugs on his own blog, like this water louse? Well, just because I couldn’t ask doesn’t mean he couldn’t provide. Yesterday he mentioned this article on how to hack your Canon PowerShot. It’s a tool called CHDK, the Canon Hacker Development Kit.
I’m jazzed. I played with it just enough to know that my camera does indeed support it, so with any luck, soon I should have some enhanced images to show off! I don’t know what the extent of the capabilities of the tool is yet, but I’m a programmer in my day job, and an unrepentant tinkerer in my free time, so I have some project ideas already milling in my head. I want to try some of the compound DOF stuff for sure, and I should be able to script up a mode that brackets the focus on a shot, automatically taking 3 or 5 photos at varying focus every time I push the button. …So exciting! I’ll be sure to post results as I find them.
Thanks, Tim, for the link… oh yeah, and for the awesome photo! 
tceisele said,
May 8, 2008 @ 8:56 am
Glad you could use the CHDK. I was kind of bummed to find out that my camera wasn’t one of the supported ones, but I’m looking forward to seeing what you can do with it.
And, if anyone is wondering why there is a dark circle around the robber fly: I’m using an improvised macro lens made out of the lens from my old Olympus OM-2 film camera (if you look through a camera lens backwards, it turns into a good close-focus magnifying lens). The problem is that it has a pretty serious case of “vignetting”, due to the camera trying to take a bigger image than the lens is providing. Usually I can zoom in far enough that the circle isn’t visible, or crop it out, but this fly was so big that I needed the maximum image size to get it all in (and even then, some of the leg tips are not visible). The squares on the graph paper are 1 mm, so this baby is about 20 mm long (almost an inch).
Scott said,
May 8, 2008 @ 9:47 am
Great shot! I too want to play with CHDK. My camera supports it. I’m just not sure that I’m enough of a camera nut to understand it. I’ll play with it more and read up on it though.
AJ said,
May 8, 2008 @ 12:15 pm
I actually like the “vignetting.” It makes for a very cool, dramatic photo!
Nick said,
May 14, 2008 @ 11:52 am
Awesome. Thanks for posting the link to the CHDK! I’m excited to play with it.