Rhododendron Leafhopper blowing bubbles

[beetleman]

Rhododendron Leafhoppers - Graphocephala. Following in Bruces great scientific boot steps. I was cooking some burgers on the BBQ the other day and spotted this fella on one or my orchids outside in the yard. He was doing the butt flick but only producing bubbles. Maybe he was just letting out air so he could fill himself up with plant juice (bleeding out the air ). Also a puzzle on the picture. You can see the spot I have somewhere in the camera on the picture. The spot is not on the movie. I do not see the spot on the camera LCD until I press the shutter down Half way for auto focus...where is this little spot of crud located?????

A movie of the bubbles..(my first one posting, let me know if it works) About 1.6mb
http://www.nebeads.com/bredaimages/winfile.wmv
A larger movie 13mb
http://www.nebeads.com/bredaimages/bubbles.m2v

[Bruce Williams]

That's a REALLY nice quality video Doug, FAR better than anything I can produce on my Minolta A2. Although in fairness to Minolta, the out-of-camera quality is a lot better than my converted and reduced size YouTube videos.

Did you shoot it on your Canon Powershot S1 with the 250D close-up lens?

When I clicked on the link in your posting it downloaded into Quicktime - then it just froze with a big ? in the middle of the player screen. I had to download it first then play it using Windows Media Player. It worked just fine that way. Maybe I just have Quicktime set as my default player for downloaded .m2v files, so it may well work ok with other folks' setups.

Bruce

[beetleman]

The Canon will take video at 640x480 x30fps and I did use the 250D. I just changed the video to a smaller .wmv file but I should put the .Mpeg2 back up also for high bandwith users. I popped them into Adobe premiere elements and exported them out into the two formats. For some reason (a setting somewhere) I cannot open any movie files in my browser with Windows Vista...comes up with an error page. . Thank you Bruce. I wish mine was flicking drops of dew

[rjlittlefield]

Nice picture & video.

You guys are motivating me to get back into the moving pictures business.

But that's probably not going to happen til next summer -- too many other things to do right now.

You can see the spot I have somewhere in the camera on the picture.

I cannot get my eyes on it. Can you be more specific? Pixel coordinates, if need be.

Thanks,
--Rik

[rjlittlefield]

Good grief, I thought you meant a spot, not a SPOT!

I assumed that thing was some dark piece of background.

But if you say it's attached to the camera, then seems like it must be some large chunk of stuff, probably near the back or maybe the front of the lens where it's very OOF and doesn't become blatant until you're stopped down quite a ways. At least that's the only thing I can think of.

You might try looking into and shining a bright light into the front of the camera, while the spot is visible on the LCD display. If you're lucky, the junk (wherever it is) will be reflective enough that you can see it.

Remember that the upper left corner of the image will be the lower left corner of the sensor, as seen from the front.

--Rik

[tpe]

Sorry i am not quite sure which camera you used for the photos, if it is with a removable lens and the SPOT is not on the CCD is it on the end of the lens inside the camera? they tend to show up pretty big like that sometimes?
Lovely colourfull picture as well btw.
tim