17 Aug Venus Flytrap Fun
So throughout my life, I’ve occasionally owned venus flytraps. I’m not what you’d call a “plant guy” by any means, in fact, the only plants I’ve ever purchased for myself are flytraps. I’m sure most of you all know that these are not your normal, give water, give sunlight kinda plant. Of course the flytrap requires both water and light, but these things eat bugs! Come on, that’s just cool. Ok… maybe I’m just too much of a boy still, but it’s fun as heck to watch. These things use the traps to catch bugs, seal up, and literally liquify said bug for food. Evolution… you are scary scary thing. Oh, and if you are reading this and going “why did this Matt guy tag this post as a gear post,” just wait for it.
A week or so ago I made my usual journey to Safeway to get the essentials, left with a venus flytrap. Don’t ask me why Safeway now carries flytraps, really healthy ones too. I’ve owned quite a few plants and this one is by far the biggest and healthiest. Probably some genetically altered, radiation-injected, spliced with the DNA of a buffalo kind of hybrid. It has super red, large traps.
The traps know when to latch down on a bug when a couple of the tiny hairs in the trap are touched. Traps I’ve owned in the past would take anywhere from 1-2 seconds to fully close up. This new trap… holy cow, it happened faster than I could react. I was dangling a bug on the end of pen in one of the traps and the thing just snapped shut, actually scared me a bit. It even latched onto the pen and had to give it a more than expected tug to free the pen from the trap. It was officially on, I was super excited to feed another trap. This time I found a spider that was a good size for the traps. This little guy put up a battle, it was almost like he knew that he just landed on a bug eating machine. He repeatedly repelled off of the plant, so I had to keep repositioning him back on, making me feel super evil. I took the creepy evilness a step further and captured the murder with my camera, coupled with a macro lens (Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 USM L IS macro) to get the action up close.
Now, I’ve done a short review on this lens before, but I think these photos help better paint the picture of what it can do. Even though this lens can stop down to F2.8, I shot these at F4, being sooo close up to this spider, my depth of field is like less than the thickness of a penny. So I shot these at F4, giving me a little more wiggle room with my DOF. Still, the DOF is incredibly super shallow, giving these a really cool look. The legs of the spider at varying degrees of in and out of focus, as well as the little teeth on the traps. Other traps in the background literally disappear in the bokeh, leaving your main subject the only thing for the viewer to focus on. This is my one and only macro lens that I have ever owned. Being mainly a portrait photographer, I only recently bought this lens to capture some product photography and other random needs for my commercial clients, so I can’t really give you any comparisons to other macros on the market. Matt likey though.
Eventually, I got my way, the plant got another meal, and…
Gonna be a busy end to this later half of the week. 7 shoots, 5 on the weekend up in Bellingham. Should have PLENTY of goodies for you soon, so check back for those. This will be the official kickoff for shooting the Active Series while I’m up there!