Mark Cassino Photography - Mark's Blog

Cabin fever is getting to me... I grabbed my film bag and paid the Allegan Forest a visit. I always do this around this time of year, and I always come back disappointed. The twisty scrappy forest never really shines in the late winter....

So here's my best photo (so far) of the trip - a pine cone, in the road. I was stomping around in the 15 degree Fahrenheit weather chasing ephemeral light that was dancing on the edges of the tree branches... This photo was almost an afterthought, but seeing as how I never actually captured any of that dancing light, it's a good thing I looked down at this pinecone on the snowy road. Here's a snapshot of the road itself - it was nicely plowed, easy driving and walking. 

The seasonal roads are impassable for most vehicles still, though they get a lot of snowmobile traffic and those with really solid 4x4's may venture down them. Both images were made on Arista Edu Ultra 200 film, using a Pentax Mz-S, FA 28-105 f4-5.6 zoom. Film developed in Rodinal 1:50.

I caught the spider in a plastic 35mm film canister and put it in the freezer overnight. Taking it out this morning and inverting the canister, it  dangled a bit from a filament of webbing. Looking at this photo, it seems to have webbing stuck to its body - I guess a spider and its web are pretty inseparable. 

This is a 123 image stack, taken with a Pentax K-3, D-FA 50mm macro lens reverse mounted on about 140 mm of extension, with dual manual flashes for illumination. The images were combined in Zerene Stacker. 

This leaf footed bug - possibly Acanthocephala terminalis - showed up in my house recently, so I arranged for a macro portrait session. This is 69 stacked images taken at approximately 2.5x lifesized.  Click on the image for a much larger file.

February is coming to a close and with it the 2014/15 snowflake photography season starts to wind down. Ironically I've had few opportunities to photograph snowflakes in the past few weeks not because winter is fading and things are warming up, but rather because it is so cold that Lake Michigan has almost completely frozen over. As the ice cover grows on the lake there is less lake effect snow.

Here's a handful of snowflake photos, most from today but with two from last week. All were exceedingly small and were photographed using a 50mm lens reverse mounted on over 350mm of extension - one very gangly set up! Click on the images for larger files.

Two more snowflake photos from last week's storm. These both look like they were forming into sectored plates but show some rime, wear and other irregularities. Both were quite small and I had the reverse mounted 50mm lens on close to 200mm of extension for these. click on the images for larger files:

 

A few pictures of trees - older exposures taken on 6x7 negative, reworked using newer techniques (click on the images to see much larger files). This first image is a back lit maple, taking in the Allegan Forest. I still see this tree regularly, but the DNR has started dumping brush and other trash behind it, so it no longer is very photogenic. Taken with a Pentax 6x7, Tri-X 320 in HC-110 Dil H. A number 11 green filter helped lighten up the scene:

This massive tree is in the Ft. Custer Recreation Area (next to the Fort Custer military facility.) Another 6x7 negative reprocessed in 2015 - don't recall the film type on this one:

We had a moderately strong winter storm in west Michigan yesterday, leaving just under 14 inches (35.5 cm) of snow - now being dubbed the Groundhog Day Snowstorm.  Unfortunately, the quality of the snow crystals was lacking and despite shooting for about 9 hours (on and off) I only managed to get a handful of acceptable images. This is the best crystal I saw all day... The plate of glass that I catch the crystals on filled up with dusty bits of broken snowflakes when suddenly in the thick of it all this very nicely formed stellar dendrite lands...  Not only is it well formed, but it also did not land on top of a lot of debris and detritus, which happens all too often in heavy snows.

The image above is my best take of this crystal - taken with a single red led "lens" (the cover that snaps over a holiday light) on the flash. I positioned the flash so that the red lens was at the edge of the frame, resulting in a crystal that is generally lit by the white light of the flash with red light entering at an angle to create colored highlights.

Before using the red light I tried a few experiments with the yellow lens. Here's the best of those: 

In this case the yellow lens is directly below the crystal, so it is getting the full effect of yellow light. In my last experiment I noted the blue color in the crystal, and that is repeated here.  I had wondered if it might be the result of the multi-white balance setting, but in experimenting yesterday I found n that multi white balance had no effect on the blue crystal phenomena - so it much just be how the crystal bends the light! I experimented with the yellow filter on a few more crystals, but ultimately abandoned it in favor of the red filter.

More images from yesterday's storm will be coming...