Despite camera manufacturers finding ways to keep increasing the ISO ratings of their cameras higher and higher, some of us still yearn for the low ISO shots. This means shooting at a very slow shutter speed. Having got myself a brand new 10-stop ND filter, I wanted to see what it could do.
One requirement is that you have a very steady tripod. The camera has to sit still for many seconds at a time. Not a breeze or vibration should affect it. The other dilemma I found, was that the camera meter couldn't calculate the exposure with the lack of light. So I had to work it out manually. Next tie, I'm bringing my light-meter.
Anyway, it's not a fantastic shot. I got rained on twice waiting for it to be clear enough to get the shot at Long Bay. But it shows what you can do with a very slow shutter speed (30 seconds)
It's the stream running into the sea down the beach by MERC. I've tried to compose the pic with three large stones mid-flow.
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The long long exposure Jun 12
Raindrops Jun 09
What to do in a wet weekend is often a puzzle. I have no enthusiasm for shopping so that rules out going to a mall. It's also harder to rouse kids to venture outside and into the bush. So, it was a bit of a solo mission with camera.
While winter here means flowering plants are thin on the ground, the Kniphofia (red hot poker plant) is flowering. It's also popular with the silver-eyes (tauhou). This time round, it was the rain-drops hanging on the flowers that appealed. 
These shots were taken with a 90mm macro and a 6x Raynox microscope adapter to "fill the frame"
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It’s a publication! May 22
This morning started with the pleasant news my paper on American alligator conservation has been accepted for publication. This was actually a look at the interplay between alligator farming and hunting, and the conservation flow-on effects of these.
There's basically two camps on the issue of wildlife farming. One is that wildlife farming can help conservation. One proposed reason is that farming increases supply, reduces prices and deters poaching. So not surprisingly, it often mooted as a policy to employ if poaching is a major conservation problem.
The other camp argues that it is a measure that exacerbates extinction risks. Legal trade provides a potential vehicle for laundering. Some also worry that any stigma associated with consumption by bans, will end and demand rise. The last point is a little tricky, because stigma effects are a little difficult to identify and measure. And it's also often asserted it can't possibly work because shooting wildlife in the actual wild, is much cheaper than raising than on a farm or ranch.
Anyway, the whole point about alligators, is that it is a conservation success story, poaching has not resumed but has collapsed, and it is a rare empirical case where farming and hunting coexist. Instead of having to come up with various theoretical models, we can actually look at what happens.
The basic message is that we tend to be far too pessimistic about the ability of wildlife farming to contribute to conservation. None of the issues identified in the arguments above hold. Prices haven't collapsed despite massive increases in output, while poaching has for all practical purposes disappeared.
There are some good reasons why. Most of the positive conservation effects are felt through the non-price paths. Leather-manufacturers switched to legal skins because of volume and quality reasons. Consumers switched to legal products out of 'green' motives. And some of the reasons for pessimism didn't hold. Pessimistic theoretical models tend to assume the wildlife is open-access. This is an extreme case, which is known to lead to over-harvest. It lead to the almost complete extinction of bison in America, moas in NZ by early Polynesians and also, the collapse of several species of whales in the 20th century. It shouldn't come as a surprise, that if your model includes an open access condition, you'll get a decline in wildlife. That's going to hold under a variety of conservation policies. It practically makes the assumption of farming redundant. And no, it didn't actually apply in the case of alligators.
Of course, this isn't arguing that wildlife farming is a general solution to conservation problems. But there could well be more cases where it could support conservation, it we weren't quite as pessimistic about its chances.
Going feral in the weekend May 20
What Ive found of late, is that it is harder to disconnect from the rest of the world, simply because connecting is now so much easier. It's a world now of tablets, smartphones and computers everywhere. So of late, I've started disconnecting completely- at least one day a week. Sunday is now my day for going feral. I disappear into a local nature reserve with nothing more than a daypack, some supplies and a camera.
The last hike was back into Okura. I figured that the actual rain would keep a lot of people away and I knew the secluded beach had a small population of NZ dotterels (tuturiwhatu). This small shore bird is actually endangered. So, it is kind of a special place to visit. Last weekend I had watched them with my son, from the edge of the beach with binoculars. This time around, I thought I'd try for some photos.
I guessed right with the rain keeping people away. So it was just a matter of hiking through the forest to reach the beach. Along the ridge lines the forest thinned out into manuka and tanekaha trees. 
Down at the beach it was close to high tide. This means the shore birds were close enough to photograph, with sufficient patience. The trick so often is to try to shoot at their eye level. That means getting down low- or lying flat on damp sand. The bonus is you look a lot less threatening to the birds.
To start with, there's a couple of dotterel photos. The first is my favourite and required very little cropping.
The mature males are in their breeding colours
The beach also has a thriving population of oyster catchers
While the land contiguous to the beach had a lot of chaffinches…
and even the odd kingfisher
Aviation regulations also apply to witches: brooms are heavier-than-air-transport aircraft May 15
From Swaziland – Witches Flying Broomsticks
Civil Aviation authorities in Swaziland explain that witches flying broomsticks above 150m will be subject to arrest and fines. What can you say?
Bird photo for Friday May 10
It really feels like winter has arrived in New Zealand. The recent torrential rain and dips in temperature have signaled the warm dry weather is at an end. With the onset of winter comes the local birds foraging for food. Their searches become increasingly demanding as their warm weather food sources wane.
This is the time of the year when we get the local groups of tauhou (silver-eyes) visiting. These small birds like the 'high octane' diet of nectar and fruit.
Not just for the birds- Archaeopteryx May 02
One of the most profound insights Darwin made with his research on evolution, was the notion of common descent. Common descent meant that every species today, descended from different species in the past. Many of the species today would also share the same common ancestor.
Darwin did not have much in the way of evidence to support this. The Origin of The Species did not employ fossil evidence to demonstrate evolution because in 1859, there wasn't a lot of fossil evidence of any kind. Likewise, Darwin did not have the molecular evidence we have today.
This made the discovery of Archeopteryx in Germany, in Late Jurassic rocks, suddenly important. This 1861 discovery, soon after the publication of the Origin, provided fossil vindication of what Darwin had deduced. Here was a species that was a genuine mosaic of avian and non-avian (theropod) traits. Birds aren't found throughout the geological column- there are none in the Permian or the Triassic. They don't appear until the Jurassic. Their ancestor had to be non-avian. This fossil confirmed that. 
What set Archeopteryx apart from many earlier transitional fossils (Caudipteryx, Anchiornis) was that it was capable of basic flight. With its laterally facing shoulder joint and split propulsion lift wing, with asymmetric feathers, basic flight was now possible. The hallux (the 4th digit) also appears reversed which would give a basic perching function [1].
Nonetheless, the long bony tail of Archeopteryx, the simple shape of its sternum, the fact it still had bony jaws with teeth, all showed its transitional status [1]. Without a keel on the sternum, the flight muscles would be limited in size. Likewise, the long bony tail (the species lacked the pygostyle of modern birds) would also have compromised flying ability.
References
[1] Sereno, P.C. (1999) The Evolution of Dinosaurs, Science 284:5423, pp2137-2147
The increasing value of privacy Apr 26
The motivation for this blog post is the acceptance of one of my papers at an international conference. All was good until I hit the photography/video waiver. A condition of attendance is that you can be photographed or videoed, and these images used by the scientific organisation for their purposes.
I am very uncomfortable with this. As a rule, I don’t put out current images of me on the web. I baulked at the Massey press-releases that used my image- and that only went to a few organisations. Little by little, through various social media and the web, our privacy is being eroded. I put a high value on it.
Part my motive of course, is I’m going to be traveling thousands of miles and be much much closer to my stalker. Who has at numerous times threatened to destroy my life. Anything that makes me easier to identify is not something that sits well.
In some ways I do find it odd. Conferences have got better at protecting privacy. Historically email addresses were published in the programmes, which were uploaded to websites. I probably got a lot of spam form bots that harvested email addresses form these sites. Now this is rare. Email addresses are much more guarded by conference organisers. This seizure of imagery is a backward move.
It is far too easy to surrender private information to others. That only makes what we have left even more valuable. I resent the presumption that I should give it up it so easily.
Can the surge in elephant killing be stopped? Apr 24
The CITES meeting in Bangkok (March 2013) highlighted once more the wavering fortunes of wild elephants. We are forced to recognise that poaching has been on a steady increase for over a decade, and that all steps to prevent this so far has failed.
At the policy level, the conflict remains one of whether a strict international ban on the trade in tusks will succeed, or whether a regulated trade will work instead. The skepticism about the international ban approach (which dates back to the 1989 CITE meeting) stems from several factors. These include the failure of the ban and accompanying education campaigns to reduce demand in foreign markets (which are to be honest, not exclusively Asian).
Source: Stock.Xchng
To move the debate on a bit, I'd like to reproduce an argument Michael Eustace made in a letter to the Business Day
DEAR SIR, The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species banned trade in ivory in 1989 but that has not stopped elephant poaching. There are many different estimates as to how many elephant are poached each year but 20,000 would seem a reasonable assumption. Most of the ivory of about 200 tons is sold to Chinese buyers with criminals making all the profit. The wildlife donor agencies persist in promoting increased law enforcement and changing the Chinese mindset as being the solution but neither is working as is evidenced by the ongoing poaching. Law enforcement in a corrupt society is ineffective and changing the Chinese mindset has been tried over many years and proved futile. China wants ivory and Africa has ivory. Both would prefer a legal trade rather than a criminal trade. Africa can sell the ivory that is gathered from natural deaths to China so as to satisfy some of the demand. There are about 500,000 elephant in Africa and some 10,000 die each year of natural causes. They leave 100 tons of ivory. That ivory could be sold by a broker, with a monopoly over all legal supplies of ivory, to a Chinese cartel of ivory carvers who could then sell to licensed retailers. That would establish a clear legal pipeline and China, as part of the deal, could undertake to close down the illegal trade and also confiscate stocks from speculators. With the price of ivory having risen strongly in recent years, speculation is likely to have been a significant part of overall demand. Some poaching will continue but it will be a lot less and a legal trade will save the lives of at least 10,000 elephants every year. In addition there would be $100 million in profits each year for Africa’s parks rather than international criminals.
This neatly encapsulates some of the frustration some conservationists have with the ban. It is the bans failure that motivates the rethink of the strategy. The basic weakness as I see it, is the ban was implemented to frustrate the illegal market of the 1980s. Expecting it to still work in the 2000s depends on the black-market not having changed- that the criminal conspiracies have not worked out means to circumvent it. The problem is the black market has changed. It is no longer hidden within the legal market. It operates with independent smuggling and sale into an underground market (at least, within China the unregistered factories and shops serve this function).
There is also a lot of elephants in Southern and Eastern Africa. That's where the 500,000 mentioned above comes from. 
Source: www.grida.no; Author: Riccardo Pravettoni, GRID-Arendal
We are in a position where natural deaths could supply a lot of demand in China. To put things into perspective, the one-off sale in 2008 to China of ivory, was an export of 62 tonnes- which they are eeking out by releasing 4-5 tonnes a year. As the letter above notes, we can actually supply a lot more than that, every year.
At the moment, the Chinese legal trade is really, just too small-scale to be impacting on the illegal trade. If we are serious about reducing poaching then this trade will have to increase in volume to crowd out the illegal market.
Film is still alive! Apr 12
It's easy to forget in this world of digital photography, iPhones and the like, that film still exists and people still use it. One of the photography-groups I belong to set up a film challenge for the month of April. The challenge is to use up a roll of film (preferably in a Minolta camera) and then post the best third of the roll. Therein lies some of the challenge. Not knowing what the picture looks like, means you can't adjust the exposure during the shoot.
It also means you can't do a lot of photo-editing later on a digital image. If you want to use some filter effects, you have to add them as you're shooting with a physical filter. I took a 3-stop ND filter and a circular-polariser with me. Also, a tripod was also essential given the low ISO rating of the film and the lack of stabilisation on my camera body (or lenses).
In this roll, I pulled the film speed down to ISO-64 to eek out a bit more motion blur.
My picks were
#1 The Pumphouse Tower (Takapuna) 
1/60 sec, 70mm @f4, Dynax 7, ISO-64, Kodak Portra 160VC, Tokina 28-70/2.8mm
#2 Pumphouse Amphitheatre Seating 
1/2 sec, 45mm @f8, Dynax 7, ISO-64, Kodak Portra 160VC, Tokina 28-70/2.8mm
#3 Lichen 
1 sec, 70mm @f8, Dynax 7, ISO-64, Kodak Portra 160VC, Tokina 28-70/2.8mm
#4 Waipunga Falls 
1 sec, 130mm @f16, Dynax 7, ISO-64, Kodak Portra 160VC, Sony 70-200/2.8 G
#5 Waipunga Falls (again) 
1 sec, 180mm @f16, Dynax 7, ISO-64, Kodak Portra 160VC, Sony 70-200/2.8 G
#6 Downstream 
2 sec, 35mm @f16, Dynax 7, ISO-64, Kodak Portra 160VC, Tokina 28-70/2.8mm
#7 Eskdale Church- Window 
1/6 sec, 70mm @f8, Dynax 7, ISO-64, Kodak Portra 160VC, Tokina 28-70/2.8mm
#8 Eskdale Church 
1/15 sec, 50mm @f8, Dynax 7, ISO-64, Kodak Portra 160VC, Tokina 28-70/2.8mm
Crossing the Napier-Taupo highway involves crossing a mountain range. At this point I was above clouds trapped between two major ridges. the effect with the morning sun was startling.
#9 Above the clouds A 
1/200 sec, 70mm @f8, Dynax 7, ISO-64, Kodak Portra 160VC, Tokina 28-70/2.8mm
#10 Amongst the clouds 
1/250 sec, 45mm @f8, Dynax 7, ISO-64, Kodak Portra 160VC, Tokina 28-70/2.8mm
#11 Above the clouds B 
1/200 sec, 50mm @f8, Dynax 7, ISO-64, Kodak Portra 160VC, Tokina 28-70/2.8mm
#12 Lake Karapiro 
1/60 sec, 70mm @f4, Dynax 7, ISO-64, Kodak Portra 160VC, Tokina 28-70/2.8mm