May 2017 – Page 2 – David Bradley

Rejigging the mobile macro rig

On friday, I took up the challenge of extracting the read lens from an old CD drive to make a monster macro for my mobile (per the tip in Practical Photography magazine). My initial design had me boring a hole in a small, flat, Lego square, which was a perfect fit for the lens. The square then sat on top of the mobile phone camera’s lens so that the lower face is flush to the camera lens. I then built a platform from Lego over which I could perch small objects to photograph. I tried a silicon chip, a magpie’s feather, some coins and other bits and pieces. The first photos are all now in my macro photo gallery. With the camera in this position, i.e. screen down I had to use a remote control to click the shutter (Airdroid on my desktop did the job for those initial shots).

However, to make a more portable and usable version, I found a bigger Lego square and bored a hole in the centre with the same bradawl and posidrive screwdriver. Cleaned up the hole and popped the lens out of the original Lego and after a quick clean with a camera cloth, nudged it into this bigger square. The bigger square allowed me to use a hairtie borrowed from Mrs Sciencebase to fasten the lens to the phone still ensuring it is flush and centred on the camera’s lens. NB Hairties often have a little metal connector within, so if you follow my version 2.0 design, make sure that portion of the hairtie is not touching your phone’s screen.

Next, was to build a slightly different rig for the phone. Various flat pieces of Lego allowed me to get things set up so the camera would be almost the right height from the object below and now with the screen facing upwards I could control the camera more hands-on. To get the focusing distance close but not too close required the equivalent of three Lego “flats” including the platform. In fact, this wouldn’t focus at this height with my particular camera and CD lens, so I need to place a credit card, or in my case an amazon gift card under each end of the right to get the height just right to focus on an object below the platform, in the test shot, a tiny fly that had died on my windowsill.

I am sure you will find your own tweaks for such a rig, an alternative to Lego and perhaps even a better way to attach the lens to the camera lens. Small, flat objects at the precise centre of the image focus best as depth-of-field is very limited and optical abberations become apparent at the image edges. However, the quality as you have probably seen my now is quite remarkable and even top of the range professional macro lenses suffer from some optical abberation!

There is an added benefit to the hairtie approach in that it makes the monster macro mobile. If you have a steady enough hand or enough light for a fast shutter speed, you can get macro-style closeups of almost anything you can point your camera at.

The baby woodpecker’s divided red crown

Okay, here’s a question for evolutionary ornithologists…or basically anyone who knows the answer: Why do the chicks of great spotted woodpeckers (Dendrocopos major) have a bifurcated red crown? The mother’s head is completely black her red feathers being limited to the underside of her hind quarters (her so-called undertail coverts) , while the adult male has in addition a red patch on the nape of his neck.

I have photographed this family of D. major over the last few weeks coming and going at the nesting site in a tree near Rampton Pocket Park north of Cambridge, England. Saw the chick for the first time on the 20th May 2017.

The lesser spotted woodpecker (Dendrocopos minor) and the green woodpecker (Picus viridis) both have red caps. The green, also known as a yaffle, has red bars below the eyes emanating from the rear of the beak, otherwise mostly green/greenish yellow.

First sighting of a D. major this year in Rampton was end of February. This one is nesting at the Cottenham end of Rampton Spinney, I’ve seen a pair there since but not photographed those again. The nesting pair of great spotted woodpeckers I’ve photographed more recently are in a tree on the edge of Giant’s Hill.

Close to the sedge (warbler)

UPDATE: Have a listen to this bird’s “song” via Xeno Canto here. The sound recording was made at Fen Drayton where there are several Sedge Warbles making a racket right now at the Guided Busway crossing to Swavesey Lake.

We often take a walk through RSPB North Warren, the bird and nature reserve immediately north of the Suffolk town of Aldeburgh. There is a fresh water marsh there with quite an array of little egrets, duck, geese and on a recent visit a pair of spoonbills (Platalea leucorodia). Heading from the hide nearest Maggi Hambling’s infamous sculpture Scallop to the hide opposite at dusk recently, we heard a loud warbling song and then spotted a tiny little bird, white eyeband, flitty flight in and out of a tangle of thorny bushes. He sat still and not too far away for me to get a few nice shots of him. It was, I believe, a sedge warbler (Acrocephalus schoenobaenus).

The RSPB website describes this species as “quite plump”, but to my eye it was a rather delicate bird with prominent creamy “eyebrows”. The sedge is a summer visitor to the UK and elsewhere, choosing to spend its winters in sub-Saharan Africa. It commonly picks insects from vegetation while perched or sometimes hovering, which we observed, but there was also a lot of “leap-catching”, in which the bird grabs flying insects as it flies between perches.

Do hares always poke their tongue out while urinating?

There is no punchline to that question, but I would like to know the answer…

This evening, Mrs Sciencebase spotted a couple of European hares (Lepus europaeus) cavorting among the local farmer’s crops that abutt the Les King Wood between the Fen Edge villages of Cottenham and Rampton a few miles north of Cambridge…I got relatively close with the zoom lens before they bounded off. They then settled down to more cavorting in the nearby rough hewn field wherein there was already another hare. There was more haresplay (one of the original pair lying down on its back like a dog waiting for a tummy rub) but there was no boxing before they scarpered again. As they made their departure a Reeves’s muntjac turned up and ambled along the opposite side of the field. More about her later…

Then heading back past the village recreation ground I glanced across and spotted yet another hare not 50 metres away. It didn’t see us and presumably didn’t catch the scent of us carnivores nor our dog. It was happily nibbling the grass and heading in our direction. Several times it hesitated, I assumed it must have spotted us, but it kept coming in closer. Then this: tongue out, urinating in full view of the camera. But even that brief interlude it was at least a dozen clicks of the camera shutter before it turned tail and bounded off to the opposite side of the rec. Incidentally, hares can run at more than 60 kmh…

Knock on wood – woodpecker update

We didn’t see the great spotted woodpeckers (Dendrocopos major) on a last visit to Rampton Pocket Park. Assumed they were still around, the chicks are too young to have fledged and even once they do, the pair will continue to feed them (male with one batch, female the other) for about 10 days. The pair were both busy there today flying in and out to their nest quite frequently, bringing food and removing faecal sacs. I got a few shots of the male bringing insects for the chicks and then just by chance a photo of a bold chick poking its head out of the hole. This is definitely the male adult, note the red patch on the back of his head.

Black-headed gull (Chroicocephalus ridibundus)

Black-headed gull (Chroicocephalus ridibundus) are everywhere, lots of nesting birds at RSPB Minsmere. In fact, some observers suggest that the presence of so many this year at the reserve might be the underyling reason why the diversity of wetland/wading birds there is so low this year. There were, however, shovellers, avocets, Mediterranean gulls, common gulls, black-tailed godwits, common terns, little terns, and several other species spotted on the day we visited.

Pictured below nesting BH gull, BH gulls mobbing a Med gull (Larus melanocephalus), BH gull coming in to land at RSPB Minsmere.

Postcard from Sizewell

Visit Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast and you cannot fail to spot the most enormous and incongruous view from the beach. No, I don’t mean Maggi Hambling’s “Scallop” at the north end (which is wonderful and fascinating) nor the Martello Tower at the Slaughden end (which is also wonderful and fascinating). No, I’m referring to the Sizewell nuclear power station near Leiston just up the coast. According to Wikipedia: “Sizewell is a small fishing village in the English county of Suffolk, England. The population of the village is included in the civil parish of Aldringham cum Thorpe.” It sounds delightful, picturesque, timeless…

Sizewell is, of course, the location of two separate nuclear power stations, the Magnox Sizewell A and Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) Sizewell B. Sizewell A is being decommissioned and stopped electricity generation in 2006, B is still operational (1200 megawatts) it was initially planned to be decommissioned in 2035, but there has now been a twenty year extension to its life. A third reactor, which would imaginitively be called Sizewell C has been discussed and led to inevitable controvery and sloganeering along the lines of “Sizewell: Twinned with Chernobyl and Fukushima”. The second stage of consulation on C is yet to take place and final investment decisions will probably not take place until Hinckley Point C in Somerset is under construction.

You don’t have to visit Aldeburgh to see Sizewell, it’s also very much in evidence looking south along the coast from the bird reserve, RSPB Minsmere from where this photo was taken.

What do adult birds do with all the chick poop in their nests?

If you feed your chicks, then you will have to deal with chick sh*t, there’s no two ways about it, unless you want guano to accumulate in your nest. Here’s an adult emerging from its nest with a mouthful of faecal sac.

A faecal sac is a mucous membrane that surrounds the faeces of the chicks of some nesting birds. It allows the parents to more easily remove waste from the nest. A faecal sac is usually dispensed within seconds of feeding, presumably full of waste from the previous meal. Adults will wait in the nest after feeding their brood until a faecal sac is produced but they may have to prod the youngster’s cloaca with their beak to stimulate excretion.

Here’s the same parent a second or two later taking flight with a mouthful to discard the toxic waste away from the nest

Less toilet based photos of great spotted woodpeckers in an earlier post.

Make a monster macro lens for your smart phone camera from an old CD player

This month’s Practical Photography magazine has a “how to” on harvesting the CD/DVD read lens from an old CD player to convert your mobile phone’s camera into a pretty impressive macro camera. I just happen to have a broken laptop that I’ve not yet recycled so I pulled the CD/DVD player out. Staring up at you when you open a laptop CD/DVD player is a convex lens. That’s actually the laser lens. UPDATE: I’ve now uploaded a selection of macro shots to my Imaging Storm site.

You don’t want that bit, I tried that by popping it out of the player and putting it gently on to my phone camera but it does nothing. No, the lens you want is the slightly larger, flatter lens behind the laser lens. In my old laptop’s CD player there were a couple of prisms between the laser lens and the read lens, but unscrewing a panel and prising it out with a pair of tweezers (I used a lens cleaning cloth between the jaws to soften their grip and avoid scratching the lens).

You can give the lens a clean with an airbrush and an alcohol wipe and then “mount” it on your phone camera lens. It has to be flat and in direct contact to work. For my tests I started up the Airdroid app so that I had remote control of the camera and put the phone face down with the CD lens in place. It’s almost impossible to keep your hand sufficiently steady to photograph something with this setup, but I had a brainwave and plonked my trusty old Swiss Army Knife, complete with mini screwdriver wrapped in the corkscrew and Sugru repairs, onto the phone in such a position that I could take a photo of said screwdriver. Clicking “shutter” control in Airdroid brought it into focus and grabbed the shot.

The Swiss knife would make a useful platform on which to mount objects for other macro shots. But, I need a more practical solution for keeping the CD lens in position (temporarily) and for holding the phone steady and close to objects I want in macro. The magazine suggest a piece of card with a hole in it and an elastic band for holding the lens in place. So that’s the next step. In the meantime, the lens is safe in an old SD card case.

Funnily enough, when I first bought a pocket digital camera back in 2003/2004 or thereabouts one of the first things I photographed to test its macro capabilities was this old Swiss Army Knife…

More information about Practical Photography here.

UPDATE: I opened my Sugru tin and inside…a flat Lego square, the central but just about exactly the size of the lens, so I bored a hole through it with a bradawl and a posidrive screwdriver (saved getting the electric drill out), cleaned up the edges with the penknife and then nudged the lens into the hole from the bottum up, making sure it was flush with the lower edge of the Lego. Perfect fit. And, the Lego lens still fits into the SD card case.

The next shot of one of the chips from the cannabilised CD drive was taken with this new mount and the chip Sellotaped to the penknife to keep it steady at the right height from the lens.

I’m sure the team at Sugru will be a little disappointed that I used the Lego square and none of the Sugru. I did, however, use an unopened package to tilt the penknife slightly to get the chip I’d mounted on the corkscrew will Sellotape more square on to the lens! Next obvious step would be to use the Sugru to construct a better mount for macro subjects…

Spooning in Aldeburgh

A recent visit to Aldeburgh gave us a small haul of photographic avian trophies, distant Eurasian spoonbills not least, although friends Brian Stone and Peter Green tell me that what I hoped was a nuthatch was actually a wheatear. There was a sweet tweeter out there too, which I think may have been a sedge warbler.

Meanwhile, the spoonbill (Platalea leucorodia), tall waterfowl with a spatulate bill, hence the name, scientific binomial hints at the broadness of bill and the second part means white heron. Rare breeding pair in the UK dining on the body of water known as the mere the south part of North Warren Nature Reserve (RSPB). There is also a whole colony on the North Norfolk coast at Holkham. Member of the ibis and spoonbill family, the Threskiornithidae.