Fireflies?

[Sylvester Graham]

I just (no seriously, just) returned from an outing trying to photograph fireflies.
I found a location that has been under my nose for years and yielded more of the bugs then I have ever seen in my life. There must have been thousands. There were SO many I was able to focus off their light alone, which seemed like a vast bioluminescent carpet.

I had with me my tiny, $50 gossen "digisix" incident/reflective meter. The gully they were in was below the meter's capabilty, but I was able to take a reflective reading from the sky, about 4 seconds at f/5.6. I placed the sky on zone 7, although almost no sky was in the picture. Considering recipricoty, and with HP5 rated at 320 for PMK, I made my first exposure at a minute and thirty seconds, the meter read 30 at f/8 (or I guessed using the meter with the sky on zone 7), and bracketed a bit. Making a couple of exposures at 1 minute@5.6 and 30sec @ 2.8 (ok FINE, this was with my Hassy 500, but I might end up taking a 4X5 down there later)

I reasoned I probably would have only needed about a second exposure to portray their outrageous numbers. And on the ride back I began to panic that with exposures of longer than a minute, they wouldn't even show up at all!

Does anyone have any experience shooting fireflies? What's the shutter speed threshold where they start to not show up? The inverse square law must be involved here. I could take the time and test all this out, but I'm afraid they'll be gone by tomorrow! Plus I'm not sure I'm that intelligent, these bugs are about the trickiest things I can remember shooting. I made sure to write down the conditions; around 9:00PM, right before dark, 90% humidity, 73 degrees.
My goal is to capture not just the fireflies, but their enviroment as well.

Thanks for any help.
-Alex

[Walter Calahan]

Well may be if there were millions of fireflies.

I've never seen a landscape picture that shows them illuminated. But that doesn't mean it's not out there.

[Ben Chase]

Well may be if there were millions of fireflies.

I've never seen a landscape picture that shows them illuminated. But that doesn't mean it's not out there.

I found one or two in Google images, but this would be quite a difficult exposure no doubt.

If I were going to approach this problem, I'd probably try it as part of a long exposure shot, using two exposures. The first exposure would be at dusk, just to capture the subtle highlights of the landscape, and then a very long exposure to hopefully capture the fireflies.

Even still, the flash is so brief, you would almost have to hope that some of them were stationary and flashed multiple times in the same spot.

It could be quite an awesome image if it worked out right.

[tim atherton]

Greg Crewdson did a whole book of them (lovely little book), recently published - not LF - MF I seem to recall for some

Mind you, in these, most of their environment is failry dark

http://photo-muse.blogspot.com/2007/...fireflies.html

http://www.skarstedt.com/index.php?m...t&object_id=80
(very poor web reproduction of what's in the book)

[Oren Grad]

Talk about a challenging assignment...!

Tim, that's a nice post - sorry I missed it when you first put it up...

[tim atherton]

as to how Crewdson did it, I've no idea - but I think he spent two solitary months at his cabin getting over a bad break-up, so he had lots of energy to channel and lots of time to do it...!

[Walter Calahan]

Cool, now I've seen photographs with fireflies.

I agree with the double exposure technique, but could the reciprocity failure be over come with LF lenses? Afterall our lenses are traditionally not as wide in aperture as smaller formats. Could the dim light of the bug register at f/5.6 or f/8.0?

When looking at the images in Tim's posting it is clear to me that a very wide aperture was used.

Perhaps I can try this with a Kodak Aero-Ektar at f/2.5? We get tons of fireflies were I live. This could be fun.

[Ben Chase]

Cool, now I've seen photographs with fireflies.

I agree with the double exposure technique, but could the reciprocity failure be over come with LF lenses? Afterall our lenses are traditionally not as wide in aperture as smaller formats. Could the dim light of the bug register at f/5.6 or f/8.0?

That would certainly be the tricky part. Perhaps the first exposure would be at a smaller aperture (f22, f32 perhaps) for DOF in the landscape. For the 2nd, it might be worth trying to refocus (yay in the dark) on the plane with the most fireflies and then open up the aperture hard-core.

It looks like at least someone has done this - I'm sure it can be done again!

[Sylvester Graham]

I'd probably try it as part of a long exposure shot, using two exposures. The first exposure would be at dusk, just to capture the subtle highlights of the landscape, and then a very long exposure to hopefully capture the fireflies.

I was thinking the same thing as I went to bed. But do you mean a double exposure, or two, seperate exposures to be put together later in photoshop?

I would imagine keeping the sky in the shot is going to be exceedingly difficult, as it's probably going to blow out nomatter what I do, or at least register as a daytime sky. And giving any kind of minus development won't help the exposure time problem, as well as bring contrast in the field down next to nothing.

Crewdson's pictures are absolutely insane. I don't know if I'll ever get there. I'm using a hasselblad 500 for this (I was thinking about 4X5 but now that's out of the question, I hope that's ok) looks like I'll need to shoot wide open, and probably closer to dusk than in darkness. Anyhow I'll be going back tonight, and the next night, and the next night, and maybe the night after that, etc...

Maybe I'll post a frame or two of the results.

-Alex

[Ben Chase]

I was thinking the same thing as I went to bed. But do you mean a double exposure, or two, seperate exposures to be put together later in photoshop?

I meant a double exposure.

I'm a former RZ67 user (Mamiya), but I'm sure that the Hassy can do a double exposure just as easily.