A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to visit Nature Conservancy's new Tieton River Canyon preserve on a guided members-only tour.
I have posted a couple of pictures from this trip before (here and here).
It's a lovely place, but hey, it has trees and brush, and with those come ticks!
Ticks around here are not considered very dangerous -- just annoying blood-sucking parasites, kind of like really slow, very tough, remarkably flat mosquitos.
So mostly I just brush them off and get on with hiking. But this one struck me as photogenic, somehow, so I took the time to take a picture. Just one picture, because the group needed to move on, but it came out OK anyway.From a technical standpoint, the interesting thing about this picture is that there's nothing much interesting -- just a compact point-and-shoot camera set to macro mode. Tick on left arm, camera held in right hand, half-press to focus and preview, full-press to take the picture. A slightly different angle would have been better, to get the tick's whole body in focus.
The lighting here is not as contrasty as in Mike Broderick's MP-E-65 higher magnification shot back in the old forums, but the two images make kind of an interesting comparison, to support a current discussion over in the Equipment forum.
--Rik
More technical: Canon SD700 IS, auto-everything. The jpeg file reports 1/200 sec at f/2.8. The inset is full frame. No sharpening or noise reduction.
). We have to be careful because the ticks around here can carry Lyme disease. A great picture Rik.
