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October 29, 2011

Drag Racing Snail

As if in a slow motion competition, this snail "explodes out of the starting gate".

It quickly reaches a "high" cruising speed.

You can see the body extension and torqueing of the shell under stress.

Here its tail is fully extended, and you can see the "contrail" behind it. Look at those vein markers flash by...

At the traps, the drag racing mollusk has completed the quarter leaf in 7:22. That's 7 minutes 22 seconds, corroborated by EXIF.

This was a severe test of autofocus performance, but the Canon macro lens came through with flying colors.

OK, to be serious, this sort of very close work is best done with manual focus, with the camera on a tripod (only natural light was used). However, because the magnification was so high, it required constant placement and panning motion to track the little creature, and it was not easy to avoid motion blur in the swinging eye stalks.

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