A trip to Brazil

Here a a few photos I snapped while at the Animal Behavior meeting in Pirenopolis, Brazil at the end of last month. I was only there for a week, and most of that week was spent indoors, listening to talks, but on occasion we did manage to escape and get a small taste of the culture of Brazil. Not speaking Portuguese, I can't tell you how accurate that taste was, however!

Taken right on the grounds of the hotel, this one is great because of the spider laying in wait inside the flower! Very appropriate for the animal behavior meeting. Unfortunately I don't study spiders, so I can't tell you what it's doing in there...

This is a motorcycle taxi, which were crawling all over Pirenopolis. I wish I'd had the chance to take one!

These last two were taken at a nature preserve about 30 minutes away from the city we were staying in. We took a van there our first day and walked around in the Brazilian forest, looking at the flora and occasionally some fauna. The light was incredibly striking when the sun began to set - the bottom photo is basically as shot. I love the depth of field on the other, it makes it look like a dreamland.

Oh, the things we do for STIR...

This is what happens when I have to take the photos for the "Reproductive Health and Choice" section of the "Clarkies with a Cause" STIR article. No one could think of what to do for photographs for this section, so I went old school sex ed and, well... you can see for yourself.

I better get some kudos from the other photographers for being the one to finally break down and shoot this! :)

Studio shots

Well, these are actually fake studio shots - I took a box and cut out the sides and covered them with white paper so that when I shined a lamp on the paper it would throw soft light all over the subjects - there's almost no shadow if I shine one light from one side and one light from the other side. I got the seamless background by taking a large white piece of drawing paper and taping it to the back so that it curved down onto the bottom. Now If I ever need a studio shot of something I don't even have to leave my room - so long as it's small enough to fit into my little box-studio! Pretty sweet, right? These are really just shots of anything that happened to be on my desk at the time, but they're pretty cute anyway. And they look nearly professional with not too much photoshop touching up, just a little dodging around the edges because I only had one lamp, and it wasn't quiiite bright enough for me to be making the kind of exposures I wanted to be.