|
|
I’m Josh Drizin, a rising senior at Denison University. I’m majoring in Biology (minor in Chemistry). I’m interested in plants, and possibly more specifically in population ecology. I joined Team Echinacea because I wanted the experience in field work and the project sounded interesting. My tick count to date is 10. I rather enjoy photography and quite like listening to music (I need to get back into playing guitar, though).
Turns out, our camera wasn’t saving settings properly. That’s lame. I got it to work and have some slightly modified settings from Julie’s post. Here’s the rundown.
Tv mode (shutter priority)
1/1000sec shutter speed
100 ISO
focus on infinity
zoomed all the way out (shortest length, equivalent to 28mm?)
We’ve been shooting in RAW format. The GIMP + ufRAW takes care of previewing and opening the RAW files. A thing to note is that the camera’s white balance is totally off (it has a purple cast to everything) so we set white balance to Daylight mode.
We’ve also marked the string in 10m increments up to 50m, though maybe there should be more. We’ll see.
As far as lining up all the pictures, we’ll be making 1m crosses painted white and keyed with black stripes. This should allow us to have both a sense of how large the space is and the orientation of the image. This way, we ought to be able to piece everything together.
I seem to have been shanghaid into this team, at least in a supporting role. Andy bought some sort of super-batteries, which seem to have a different connector than the Sony Handycam cameras he has. So he calls on me to solder connectors for them. Turns out, our hack job only works on the newer models of Handycam, though we’re working on getting the older ones to not throw up an error.
To get the newer ones working, we plug in the original battery, plug our hacked battery into the external power port, then remove the original battery. Doing it any other way makes the camera throw an error and not turn on fully.
Well, another picture-dump type entry tonight. Ian apparently like’s Jameson’s (now unused) mattress. He doesn’t have this beetle in his collection. I probably should’ve put it in my pocket for him. Speaking of beetles, I met a very friendly ladybug.
This morning we took phenology data on our Visors. For our non-biology inclined readers, phenology is the study of the timings of various organic systems (reproduction, migration, etc) in relation to the climate. Visors are the Palm-Pilots with which we take data. Open this picture in a new window. Note the single row of stamens (the yellow pollen-bearing male parts) and the three rows of styles (the stigma is on top; it’s the pollen-receptive bit). This is essentially the bulk of our observation for the phenology data.
In the afternoon, we flagged and twist-tied every (possibly) flowering head in the entire common garden. We have allegedly 1000 or more flowering heads in the garden. Jameson observes a few of these flowering heads.
Finally, Jameson throws a sandal.
This afternoon for work, a kite was flown. Now, this was not just any kite. This kite had a name that involved “16”, as that presumably is roughly the square footage of this beast. Being a gusty afternoon (Rachel clocked the wind speeds at anywhere from 7 to 27 mph). Having trouble getting the kite up by just letting the gusts grab it, I went to the house to grab a few more pairs of gloves (didn’t want rope burn). As I returned, Rachel and Julie figured out the trick to get the kite up: run with it.
In fact, two people run with it. One holds the kite, the other the spool. They both run into the wind. At the right time (during a gust, most likely) the kite-holder lets go and the spool-holder keeps going. This will launch the kite high into the air. It’s interesting to note that the kite pulls back. Hard. We didn’t hook up the camera apparatus, though; our kite-flying skills are not yet honed (we’re not well-oiled enough, probably) and we didn’t want to break an expensive camera. The kite came down hard, incidentally.
Taking the kite down is a three-person job, ideally. One person spools the string (vertically! horizontally it twists, shortening the life of said string) while another pulls the kite down by the string. The third person is between them, feeding the slack to the spooler and preventing the kite from slipping back up while the puller is, ah, pulling. We had gardening gloves on to prevent rope burn. Effective in preventing rope-burn, ineffective in actually holding onto the damn string. We could really use gloves with rubber grips.
The final step is the actual photography part. Once we’re good at flying the kite (Stuart says some call it “poor-man’s sailing), we’ll send up the victim camera to take our aerial photos. We tested the camera at various distances from the side of the storage building (looking for an echinacea-sized X of tape). At 40m (lower than our flying height, I fear), the tape was indistinguishable from the building. It may have been the settings, it may have been the shaded lighting, and it may have been the camera’s tiny screen. We can’t say until they’re on a computer (not easy, as the card reader seems to have failed). While I’m not worried that the camera’s 7.1MP resolution will be too small to discern detail, my concern is that the optics on the camera are simply not good enough to resolve something the size of flower-heads. The camera is a semi-compact camera; ideally, we’d have a good dSLR (Canon Digital Rebel XT[i] or Nikon d40[x]) with a high-quality and fast lens. This is expensive, though, and quite a bit heavier.
Anyway, since the images need to be meshed into a giant map-type image (we’re like Google Earth, only without the satellites), there needs to be a way to have consistent landmarks in the fields we plan on photographing. This is where the painted wooden sticks come in. We’d (preferably) put flat, white-painted pieces of wood on stakes and place them in the field as markers to line up the images later. The final plans for this have yet to be made.
For now, though, we need to consistently get the kite into the air and onto the ground safely before taking pictures. We’ll see how this goes.
So in the past several days, we’ve had many interesting goings-on. Jameson has built a garden. We went looking for some baby(ish?) raccoons that Amy saw, but they weren’t there. Instead, there were many dead damselflies and dragonflies. We also have a kill jars full of dead insects on our kitchen table as well as a betta fish and some snails. Jameson has also created the next big thing: hard-boiled eggsicles
As far as the Echinacea goes, it was rough work in the ’99 garden today. the east side of the garden was initially labeled 1/3 meter short, but we fixed the problems and made stuff work. I actually got a good shot of a pollinator (some sort of bee) and Amy found a snake skin. After today, my tick count is 5 (the tick I took a picture of was named Marty the Martyr)
Well, until I figure out why putting images in directly won’t work properly for me, I’ll just link them. Click to see the picture. Also, Ian keeps putting stuff in his kill jars. He’s shuffling insects from this mortal coil.
Rosa arkansana – Pasture rose
Lilium philadelphicum – Prairie lily
some kind of Bluet – a damselfly
Heliopsis helianthoides – Sunflower
Phlox pilosa – Prairie Phlox
Echinacea angustifolia – narrow-leaved purple coneflower (before flowering)
This Echinacea (#11432) got creamed by a road grating truck. It had at least two heads and more than forty-five basal leaves. Being a taproot, it’ll likely grow back at some point, but if cars keep driving over it, who knows.
|
|
