The Late 2008 Series

 

The 2 prints which I was most attracted to is the colour

Here are the prints which are on sale. 8" x 8" was selling for 150 SGD 12" x 12" was selling for 250 SGD

Please contact me at choomengfoo@gmail.com and leave me your contacts when you are interested to purchase the Prints. My work are also on sale at http://insecthunter.redbubble.com and http://insecthunter.imagekind.com

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Check out the PROMOTION below.

Newsletter

Here is the Newsletter I had tried for the pass few months to produce. It is out finally after much help in editing and proof reading by Lindy.

Download the Newsletter PDF - 6 MB

Merry Christmas

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="151" caption="Click here to download and play"][/caption] Merry Christmas!

It was a wonderful Flickr world that we had enjoyed.

Thanks everyone at Flickr.

This is something I had taken some time ago.

http://zhutianyun.sfm121u.com/files/botannic_garden_show.pps

Contemplation of Death

Death had been a subject which we explored frequently in our daily life, most of us would not like to come face to face with it, however through our journey on earth, inevitably we have to deal with it when it occurs to our close ones, and eventually we have to face death ourselves. Death is the return before birth.

Photo sale

[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="294" caption="Always eager Always unceasing Never pause to take a breather When will you feel the weight of your work Never did you wonder"][/caption]

We participated in the Photo Fair organised by Objectif. It was a fun event where we learned and experienced how to communicate the appreciation of arthropods to prospective art collectors. At the start, when we had finished laying out the photographs, I showed my kids how to cut the first deal, find a good reasons so that the purchase was difficult to reject. I requested from the first patron to purchase our photocard for a dollar each to bless our stall and he politely obliged. He had done a good deed and we had a good start. The dollar went into our transparent money vase. The kids were so inspired and thrilled to see the money growing that they went on to create a total of 122 photo cards sale.

Japanese Beetle

Never knew that there are such insect as Japanese Beetle. I mean even Beetles belong to a certain country. Human is so territorial animal and we assumed beetles have sovereignty too.  I shot this in Lijiang. It seems they had cross the ocean and landed on the high plateau.

For those who missed the Photo Sale

Here is the collection of 10 Photo cards which I had sold 122 of them. We are really excited about the sale and felt that it is a small step forward in my work. The photo cards can also be purchased here :
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Leech Bite

Gotten 2 bites and they are not healing. Here is a website about leech.
http://users.wired.net.au/susan/leeches.htm
Have not found a cure for the leech bite.

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Amazing woman

http://angela.wolf.at.tf/
Check her work here. Her macro is superb.

Insect as a specimen

Garnet Hertz, in his installation of the fly, wired LED lights to its body and limbs, controlled the blinking of these LED through some users from the WWW. A signifier of disrespect for the small little insect, making it a toy for all to have fun. Man always thinks that he is the master of other living things, mutilate them as they wish.

http://www.conceptlab.com/fly/

Photographic Sponsorship

http://www.henricartierbresson.org/prix/PRIX_dossier_en.htm

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Presentation

Amazing, my images of an ant mimic bug was used in a slide presentation. It was done by one darrendraper, 11 months ago











http://www.slideshare.net/darrendraper/presentation-101

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Shooting insect in mid flight - fotoopa

He constructed a tracking machine to track insect in flight and set the camera in focus and snapped. Beautiful images of insect in mid-flight, beautiful. He hails from Belgium.




http://www.pbase.com/fotoopa/flying_insects_2008

just realised he has a Flickr site too at http://www.flickr.com/photos/fotoopa_hs/

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Best way to view Flickr photo stream

Use the Cooliris, download and install into Firefox. If you do not have firefox, look it up here, www.firefox.com.
Once installed, relaunch Firefox, browse to any photo stream and click next to the second page before click on the small cooliris and launch into a cool collection of images.
This is a fast way to find the images that you are interested.
http://www.cooliris.com/

Focus Stacking

A nice quick tutorial by Lord V
http://www.flickr.com/groups/macroviewers/discuss/163367/

Here is the program that runs on the Windows. http://www.hadleyweb.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/CZ5/combinez5.htm

Probelms of difraction F5.6 is crisp with the MPE 65mm, this was illustrated by Lord V. http://www.flickr.com/groups/macroviewers/discuss/72057594066234313/

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Philippe Blancho

A visit to www.philippeblanchot.com, the site of Philippe Blancho, I was impressed by the variety and closeness of all the images. There so many different faces of insect being documented. Just Amazing!
The site is in French. I used babel Fish to translate it into English. It makes some sense. Great Guy and making a good living shooting Insects.

Vespidae, subfamily Stenogastrinae

My most digg image.

Kingdom: Animalia

Phylum: Arthropoda

Class: Insecta

Order: Hymenoptera

Suborder: Apocrita

Superfamily: Vespoidea

Family: Vespidae,

subfamily Stenogastrinae

I found rather interesting website http://vespa-bicolor.net/main/mainframe.htm
Dedicated to bees and wasp. Long articles on his visit to Sentosa.
http://www.vespa-bicolor.net/main/trips/sg5-7-2005.htm

Flickr cure for China

I had loaded this flickr plugin. Check here https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addons/policy/0/4286/22084
But I could only see some of the images, especially those that were loaded before March. It could be certain new server used by Flickr which were deadly banned, certain IP address gets filtered. Who knows? With all these censor and interference, even the good guys suffer. Who knows what is good or bad. They were just harmless photographs of arthropods.
It seems the reason for banning Flickr is very much linked to political reasons, according to reports, due to some protest in xiamen, Flickr should keep politics out of fun. Don't get to serious. Get Firefox or Flock to really feel the power of Flickr. I had loaded Flock and viola, I could see all my Flickr images. Bravo. Try Flock.

Spider Pendant

I was not sure whether spider pedant would be attractive to ladies, but I found Kabi Designs did have one. It looks really huge and I beg it is pretty heavy. Here is the site to check it out: http://www.flickr.com/photos/karinaptoxx/2312500336/.
I can't read the language. Hope you can figure out something.

 

The work of Lord V

The single person that had shot lots of insects and marco shots is none other that Lord V. As of today, he had about 10,787 photos macro shots listed on his Flickr site. His photographs are crispy sharp. He shot with flashes mounted on bracket and softened by his modified diffuser. You can check it here, http://lordv.smugmug.com/popular/#120917883 . His methods are shared and discussed here, http://www.flickr.com/groups/mimicry/discuss/66514/ His equipment and attachment are show here : http://www.flickr.com/photos/lordv/sets/72157594293307036/show/.

The fact that he uses flashes, he was able to reduce the aperture sometimes to as much as f16, so that he can get a better depth of filed and more saturated colours on the insect. The great thing about Flickr is that we can check the shot property and learn from the setting Lord V uses. Here is the property of this shot, the aperture is f5.6 and shot with 65mm macro lens.
I did a cut and paste of the property here.

Camera:	Canon EOS 40D
Exposure:	0.005 sec (1/200)
Aperture:	f/5.6
Focal Length:	65 mm
ISO Speed:	200
Exposure Bias:	0 EV
Flash:	Flash fired

Orientation:	Horizontal (normal)
X-Resolution:	72 dpi
Y-Resolution:	72 dpi
Software:	Adobe Photoshop CS2 Windows
Date and Time:	2008:02:23 12:21:35
YCbCr Positioning:	Centered
Exposure Program:	Manual
Date and Time (Original):	2008:02:23 08:39:09
Date and Time (Digitized):	2008:02:23 08:39:09
Shutter Speed:	499712/65536
Sub-Second Time:	45
Sub-Second Time (Original):	45
Sub-Second Time (Digitized):	45
Color Space:	sRGB
Focal Plane X-Resolution:	4438.356 dpi
Focal Plane Y-Resolution:	4445.969 dpi
Exposure Mode:	Manual
Compression:	JPEG
XMP Date and Time (Original):	2008-02-23T08:39:09Z
Image Width:	957 pixels
Image Height:	638 pixels

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Oecophylla smaragdina (Weaver Ant / Kerengga)

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="Weaver Ant "][/caption]

I learned from odonatah that they are Oecophylla smaragdina (Weaver Ant / Kerengga)
Now we know.