Love dances [explored on 2020/05/30]

It was a lukewarm late Spring evening; the water of the canal was flowing silently besides me - a discreet companion for my walk. I could almost feel the thin crescent of the Moon slowly sliding towards the western horizon. One could think that it was a silent evening indeed but, well, the air was overflowing with a most clangorous croaking choir. Oh, the calls of the frogs were so astoundingly diverse... And they jumbled up with the loud chirping of the crickets.
At last the trees thinned out and I was in the open fields and the starry sky was flickering among the grass, all along the ditches. Ops, the stars were still in the sky after all, and the lands were teeming with fireflies. They were gently dancing their love dances, completely oblivious of my presence.
At first I was entranced by their mesmerizing, sparkling motions, which I soon came to envision as plucked notes of mandolines against the orchestra in a Vivaldi concerto (to realize what I am trying to convey you can listen to some minutes of the Concerto for 2 Mandolines, Strings and B.C. in G major RV 532 in the fantastic performance of the Europa Galante ensemble conducted by Fabio Biondi).
At last I started doing my very first attempts at photographing fireflies. This image is the result of my first postprocessing experience of this kind: I hope that you will enjoy it. Hopefully I will post better fireflies shots in the near future.
[Sorry, on smartphones my fireflies look a bit belittled; moreover I am aware that some displays whiten a bit their beautiful yellow light, the magical trick of luciferin/luciferase which has enabled us humans to look far deeper into the workings of cells than before]

It was one of my unfulfilled dreams to photograph fireflies, which, sadly, are becoming a rarity in our countryside; the positive effects of the lockdown for the environment have probably favoured a blooming this year, so I decided to have a try. I followed the advices of a master of fireflies photography, the Bulgarian photographer Hristo Svinarov. However I will eagerly accept hints and positive criticism from everyone who will be so kind to offer it.

Explored on 2020/05/30 no. 96

I have stacked 10 5-second photos with the Gimp and tried hard to get something decent out of them. As the basic layer I used an image I have obtained by averaging the photos with John Paul ChaCha's Chasys Draw IES Artist: the fireflies themselves were almost obliterated but the landscape were effectively denoised, while the details were improved. After the stacking work in the Gimp I added some small touches with Nik Color Efex Pro 4.
Simply by my natural curiosity I tried the inverted RGB blue channel technique described by Boris Hajdukovic as a possible final contribution to the processing. The results of this interesting trick are utterly unpredictable when we come to low-light captures; I discovered that in this context this technique can effectively isolate the fireflies from the background.

Taken in: Italy / Lombardy / Cambiago / Cascina Orombella (show map)

Taken on: May 25, 2020

Tags:

evening

Spring

fireflies

lucciole

campagna

countryside

fields

ditches

trees

stars

campi

fossi

dance

love

corteggiamento

coutring

mating

Nikon

D5100

Samyang

Samyang 14 mm

Nik Color Efex Pro 4

Color Efex

Chasys Draw

stacking

averaging

Darktable

nature

frogs

crickets

toads

canals

calls

choir

luciferin

luciferase

Vivaldi

Concerto

mandolines

bioluminescence « less

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Camera: Nikon D5100, f/4.0, 5 sec, 14mm (=21mm), ISO 1250 (more info) (hide info)

Camera:	Nikon D5100
Aperture:	f/4.0
Exposure Time:	5
Focal Length:	14mm (35mm equivalent: 21mm)
ISO:	1250
Exposure Bias:	0 EV
Flash:	No Flash
Exposure Program:	Shutter speed priority AE
Exposure Mode:	Auto
Metering Mode:	Multi-segment
White Balance:	Auto
Gain Control:	High gain up
Color Space:	Uncalibrated
Software:	Ver.1.01
Show full info

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