Out of Sight

About 10 years ago I was in a really cool place in Ecuador – the Jatun Sacha reserve (which is part of the Jatun Sacha foundation ). Walking through the trails, I was simply amazed by the diversity of insects I observed, but I didn’t even have to go to the trails, insects were literally everywhere: the dorms, the kitchen, and even the bathrooms. The bathroom compound was an open space structure and luckily for me, it also had lights I could turn on. Just before sunset, I’d turn on the lights, go and eat dinner for about 45 minutes, and when I’d come back, I’d check the catch of the day (in other words, the bathroom was a light trap). The surrealness of spending more than an hour each day taking photos of insects in a bathroom was not lost on me, but I liked it! Here are a select few of the insects (mostly moths, also, one spider) I shot during that time, most were identified via iNaturalist , and some I had help with (which I’ll mention). Since I’m not usually identifying species fro...

A few years ago I happened to schedule three separate macro photography sessions over the span of a bit under 24 hours. Each shooting session had a group of macro photographers shooting together. When going to take photos of insects in an open area (e.g. not a jungle), we'd usually pick sunrise/sunset/night times, to avoid the harsh sunlight and the hyper activeness of the subjects. Here are the photos I took, shot in Israel in early March. 1)       Night session – A bit before midnight in Caesarea 22:30 - arrive at the location, get my equipment ready and start looking around. 23:05 – The first cool photo I took was of a juvenile unidentified jumping spider (family Salticidae), this is a three-image focus stack. This little jumper was very inquisitive and curious, I did gently direct it to this position, which is the reason you see sand particles on it. 23:18 – First time seeing this genus ( Hypsicorypha ) of plant-mimicking mantis from the family Em...

Did I already mention that ever since I was a kid I was fascinated with insects and that the ones that fascinated me the most were mantises? Why yes, I believe I did. The biggest and most common mantis in my area was the bush mantis ( Sphodromantis viridis ) . that’s the reason I kept them as pets when I was younger, and was also why I decided to raise a few in 2011 and photograph their entire life cycle.

First thing's first - I am not a software engineer and never had any formal programming training. I do like creating new things and I find computer vision fascinating. I believe that it is simpler than it might initially appear. All of this started as an attempt to create a normal Sudoku solving function, but after I did that, I thought it would be cooler to combine Sudoku solving with computer vision.  To make it a bit easier, I divided this operation into nine parts:       Grabbing the image.         Transferring the original image to B/W.         Finding the shape with the biggest bounding box. this is our (deformed) sudoku board.         Finding the corner coordinates of that shape.         Using the corners, warp that shape to a perfect square.         Find the digit in each cell (if there’s indeed a digit in it).         Solve the sudoku. ...