Tag Archives: macro

Grasshopper – No Grass

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Was sat out in the garden having a fag and a coffee when this chap hopped up onto the table. I didn’t expect it to still be there by the time I’d gone indoors and attached the kenko tubes to the 70-200 but he didn’t seem to be in any great rush to get back into the grass.
Grass would have made a better background but I’m not complaining too much. Took a few shots at a variety of settings, finding that f9 -f11 almost gave me enough DOF to keep it relatively sharp. Had to up the ISO to 800 to be able to hand hold and shoot. If I’d had the tripod handy I may have been able to take more shots and stack them all together but wasn’t sure how long it’d hang around for !!

Grasshopper - No Grass

Grasshopper - No Grass

Grasshopper - No Grass

Don’t think this was the same one from the weekend as that one never had the coloured armour behind it’s head. Somehow it seems that the garden at Canvey Castle here is becoming a bit of a nature reserve. If anyone could Identify what make and model of grasshopper this is I’d be quite interested to hear from you.

The Scream

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Imagine my delight when the humdrum and otherwise normal Thursday evening of pointless TV was interrupted by the discovery of a dead fly.
Armed with the off camera flash, wireless triggers ant a 12mm Kenko Tube, I first drew some stick like pictures and posed the corpse. You know the stuff, staircases, horses etc.
None of these were particularly good, so I just tried different angles for the flash, at different power settings until I came up with this.

Can’t be bothered to do much processing so you get it here in all it’s dead, and decaying glory….. Quite like the ‘expression on it’s poor dead face.

The Scream

Star Wars – Alien Life form Discovered in Cyprus…..

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Alien Species

Found this little chap sat on the wall of our villa in Cyprus. Obliginly he/she/it was happy to sit still and wait for me to get the Kenko Tubes attached to the 17-50 Tamron and pose while I snapped away. Minimal processing means that this is the first of a rather large bunch. Need to find some tome to wade through the rest…..

Stapler, patented in 1866, improved numerous times since………

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Stapler - Up close and personal

The first known stapler was handmade in the 18th century in France for King Louis XV. Each staple was inscribed with the insignia of the royal court, as required.[1] The growing uses of paper in the 19th century created a demand for an efficient paper fastener.[2]

In 1866, George McGill received U.S. patent 56,587 [3] for a small, bendable brass paper fastener that was a precursor to the modern staple. In 1867, he received U.S. patent 67,665[4] for a press to insert the fastener into paper. He showed his invention at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and continued to work on these and other various paper fasteners through the 1880s. In 1868 a patent was also taken out for a stapler in England by C.H.Gould. As well, also in 1868, Albert Kletzker of St Louis, MO patented a device to staple paper.

In 1877 Henry R. Heyl filed patent number 195603 for the first machines to both insert and clinch a staple in one step [5],and for this reason some consider him as the inventor of the modern stapler. In 1876 and 1877 Heyl also filed patents for the Novelty Paper Box Manufacturing Co of Philadelphia,PA [6], However, the N. P. B. Manufacturing Co.’s inventions were to be used to staple boxes and books.

The first machine to hold a magazine of many preformed staples came out in 1878.

On February 18, 1879, George McGill received patent 212,316[7] for the McGill Single-Stroke Staple Press, the first commercially successful stapler. This device weighed over two and a half pounds and loaded a single 1/2 inch wide wire staple, which it could drive through several sheets of paper.

The first published use of the word “stapler” to indicate a machine for fastening papers with a thin metal wire was in an advertisement in the American Munsey’s Magazine in 1901