Press Button To Blog - Shellfish Coin Hoarders

Recently during a summer gardening kick, my wife started herself a compost bin, meant to better nourish her green younglings that had yet to sprout. Like with all of her personal projects, whether I'd like to or not I end up learning a bit about her hobbies by proxy. For what little it might be relatively, I now know more about yarn and foreign languages than I'd ever practically need. The only context for either of those things are my hastily sewn together holey socks I can't force myself to throw away and in my teenage years an over appreciation of 1990's late night erotic films with poorly written subtitles blocking my view of nipples.

One tidbit I learned about growing shit out of other literal shit, is that there are various brands of bug that help keep the delicate ecosystem of agriculture afloat. Some of the more common ones would be isopods and springtails, who help eat some of the rotten refuse left behind by bigger species and alternative food sources, digesting the organic matter to then poop out what is essentially vitamin packed plant food. People in the know, know that I love playing with virtually all types of animals and insects, and although a strain to both see and catch, these tiny crustaceans with their segmented bodies and delicate antennae are absolutely adorable. Like tiny cockroaches, only these ones aren't complete fucking assholes.

So, with a new found appreciation for all of the hard work the Rolly Pollies do, I dug through more than a found mounds of dirt to collect a few to use as my models in a photoshoot before releasing them into their new home. A hard, complex exoskeleton exterior gives way to a soft tickly underbelly and circulatory system made of gold. A true modelling superstar in the making.

The question was how could I make them more visually interesting than just, you know, an insect on the ground? My first train of thought was dinosaurs. As it usually is of course. I honestly don't think people fathom dinosaurs nearly enough, so whenever a problem presents itself, the first thing I can consider is, what would the dinos do? In this case, the genus of isopods dates back to prehistoric times, just like, wait for it...dinosaurs. Versions of isopods lived among the earliest species on the planet, and even to this day certain breeds replicate some of that old world eras of gigantism, and can manage to grow to be nearly two feet long. Picture this, a colony of pill bugs living in a parasitic relationship with a rogue velociraptor, living on the scruff of the dinosaur's neck as the beast charges into battle against a triceratops. It's got conflict of historic proportions, it's got the everlasting friendship, it's got the Jurassic action for the kid in all of us, it's a photo worth at least a few thousand words. Even if we went with the more realistic bird-like micro raptors and not the blood thirsty ones from the movies, the isopods would probably still make a good bird feed.

Unfortunately I didn't have any of those creatures available at the time of shooting, so an alternate plan was in order. My brain got to percolating, brewing up something else "old" that would be satisfactory. You know what's old, other than my references? Coins! Obviously money can also be new, but nobody likes new money do they. The metal smells weird and lacks that je ne sais quoi of absent fecal residue and the people who come into money are uppity and classless to say the least. Pft.

Again I had to dig, not in the dirt, this time into my closet to find a small baggie of older coins that I had collected from when I was a kid. Most of the money I had saved, I don't even know where they came from. I've certainly never been to Singapore, yet, I've got a handful of coins like I'm out trying to buy myself some curry puffs, but even if there weren't practical in my day to day life, a lot of them are definitely cool looking with their intricate, uncommon (to me and most people) designs. It's a lot cooler to have a seahorse on your giant silver coin than it is to have the Queen of England (don't let Prince Harry know I said that about his dead mother, the little wiener might cry).

The first challenge I faced was capturing these moving insects in detail. With their tiny size I had to use my macro lens to achieve the level of clarity and sharpness I wanted. But with a macro lens, even the slightest movement completely takes your subject out of the frame of focus, meaning now I had to adjust my shot. Isopods move quickly and erratically, making it hard to predict their movements and capture them on camera.

As I started looking through the first images I attempted to take, I realized the lighting could be a bit more consistent then what I had prepared. That's when I decided to bust out my product light box. The box provided a clean, even light that allowed the intricate details of the isopods to come through as they crawled across the coins. It also allowed me to control the background of the shots more effectively, cause at the time my cat was playing detective and was wandering around trying to figure out what the hell I was doing. On the downsides, I also found that sometimes the light could be a bit too bright and uniform, which resulted in some of the shots looking a bit flat that I then needed to spice up in post. And I didn't properly account for the pill bug's shell being reflective, so which in some shots the shine added some flair to the proceedings, in others they gave me less than positive glare to contend with that distracted from my shots.

But, we were on a path, even if we hadn't yet reached our destination. It was here I also decided to add more to the scene to finish making things pop. With the shell reflections now being so prominent, I knew something akin to jewelry would be my best options. But maybe it's because I'm poor, or maybe because I'm a bad husband, but there's not a ton of shiny baubles around my house. I've never been a fan of decorating humans with blood diamonds and whatnot. Personal preference, I just don't care about owning these sorts of things, let alone enjoy buying them for others. It's no thought, pretty looking junk without sentimental value other than the reason they were gifted. Anyway. Despite my tangent, I have bought my wife various pieces of jewelry over the years, mostly from Etsy, of unique "one of a kind" pieces that I thought she'd like, which she did, just not enough to wear and instead she's put them on "display". Like I said, jewelry, not my forte. So I borrowed back a pendant I had given to my wife of a jewel adorned spider, figuring that the insect theming might mesh well. This combination is what finally made the shots truly pop, as now the isopods had something more visually striking to climb all over while adding some glitz and glamour.

Despite the initial challenges, I was pleased with the resulting photos. I wouldn't go as far to say any of the shots are among my personal favourites I ever taken, but I am happier with the final product than most of the projects I've worked on. If I took into account all of the work I had done up until that point, I would give this set an A+ in execution. The isopods made for captivating subjects with their unique shapes and colors. And the old coins I added to the mix provided an interesting contrast with their textures and rusted edges. The spider was the focal point that brought the taste of the soup together.

As I edited the photos, I found myself appreciating even more the beauty and complexity of these tiny creatures as I played around with the settings. Things looked good before post processing, but once I played with the tones and saturation, it was all elevated to a more interesting dimension. I was reminded of how much there is to discover in the world around us, even in the tiny creatures we often overlook. And that's what makes photography such a fascinating and fulfilling pursuit.