Alien Invasion

A grotesque creature has decended, or should I say ascended, into middle Georgia. With the right light and music, Magicicada would look and sound at home pursuing Sigourney Weaver through the Nostromo. Much like the acid filled bugs in Alien, these insects have been waiting for just the right time to emerge.

Over the last three weeks, millions of 13 year cicadas have crawled out of the ground as grubs, shed their skin, and emerged as loudly singing, red-eyed, winged monsters. Unlike the late-summer annual cicadas (which actually emerge from the ground every three to five years, but are present every year), these annoying beasts emerge every 13 years (some are on a 17 year cycle). Their only goal is to mate, lay eggs in tree branches, and die. The young hatch, fall to the ground, and burrow below, not to be seen for another 13 years.

With so many of these odd creatures flying about the yard, I couldn't resist a few macro shots. As such is the case with any photo, my intent is to capture something unexpected, yet something that tells a story. These were all taken with my Sigma 105mm macro, the only lens I own that is not a Nikon. With a depth of field of less than a 1/4 inch at f2.8, shooting handheld is tricky and any breeze is a curse. While a tripod might have made focusing easier, navigating a camera through tree limbs and following the bugs made it impractical, if not impossible.

March Madness

Could there possibly be a better sporting event than March Madness? I know it’s a stretch to think of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship as one event when there are actually 68 teams in the field and somewhere around 862 games played. But for three weeks, a big chunk of the world’s male population forgets that they really don’t care that much about basketball and glues themselves to the television to see if Butler, Gonzaga, or some other underdog will emerge as this year’s Cinderella in sneakers, dashing their bracket and bragging rights to smithereens.

I was recently asked by a friend to take some photos of a local basketball league for his church’s website. Not exactly the big dance, but an opportunity to learn, nonetheless. The only problem—his church’s gym is lighted with a minimal number of fluorescent fixtures. No high-bay metal halides. No downlights from the overhead scoreboard. From a photography standpoint, it might as well be lighted by a couple of lilac bath candles and a kid with a green glowstick. I’m talking dark.

Not to be deterred, I schemed up an idea based on my travels to college arenas, where real sports photogs use the built in light system. So with two 340 watt/second Alien Bee moonlights on lightstands bouncing off of the white ceiling and fired wirelessly with a radio trigger, I was able to get f2-1/50 ambient light to look something like f8-1/250. Just what I needed to stop some action. They aren’t great compositions or works of art. No matter how much I encouraged them, the players ran around wherever they wanted to go, oblivious to the rule of thirds or my needs. But I learned a new technique that worked very well, and hopefully populated a Baptist website with the best darn recreation league basketball photos ever taken in a middle-Georgia church gym in March. Now that’s madness.