{"id":150,"date":"2010-06-12T09:11:56","date_gmt":"2010-06-12T13:11:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/?p=150"},"modified":"2010-06-12T09:11:56","modified_gmt":"2010-06-12T13:11:56","slug":"ants-herding-aphids","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/?p=150","title":{"rendered":"Ants Herding Aphids"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday after work Joan went out to inspect her vast flower beds. At one point she stuck her head back in the door to say “There are ants herding aphids out here.”<\/p>\n

I have learned over the years that when your wife<\/span> spotter announces a find I am required go get the camera and investigate.<\/p>\n

For those of you who have not heard about or seen ants herding aphids, it is an example of biological mutualism. You can read more about it here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As you know, ants are very small (these were about one quarter of an inch long) and (most commonly) black. This makes for a difficult photographic subject. Thus,\u00a0 I had some experimenting to do.<\/p>\n

To get high magnifications, I used my extension tubes… this was the first time I had a need for all three at once.\u00a0 The camera was mounted on the tripod… no hand holding at this magnification.<\/p>\n

Light was provided by an off camera flash diffused with a soft-box. This was lying on the ground off to one side or hand held off to the side more-or-less at the level of the subject.<\/p>\n

This\u00a0 photo was taken using my 70-300 mm lens with three extension tubes (36 + 20 + 12 = 68 mm):<\/p>\n

[singlepic id=85 w=300 h= mode= float=]<\/code><\/p>\n

For this photo, I switched to the 90 mm macro lens and ended up using just the two larger extension tubes… all three tubes gave too much magnification:<\/p>\n

[singlepic id=86 w=300 h= mode= float=]<\/code><\/p>\n

\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday after work Joan went out to inspect her vast flower beds. At one point she stuck her head back in the door to say “There are ants herding aphids out here.” I have learned over the years that when your wife spotter announces a find I am required go get the camera and investigate. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[28,25,3],"tags":[155,156,31],"class_list":["post-150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-insects","category-the-yard","category-wildlife","tag-ants","tag-aphids","tag-insects"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=150"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":161,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/150\/revisions\/161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gorga.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}