cocoons n stuff

It's been one hell of week and it's not going to get better very soon. I've been stressed looking for a place and need to be moved out this week... so it'll be a bit before I can post on the blog again, but when I do i have more glass plates to post.

On the 20 dubernardi began to spin and by the 21 the cocoon was done. So the only dubernardi i have left is going to a perty moth!

cecropias spun the 17th and 19th so i have 2 cocoons now waiting for 3 more to spin :)


jul 16 and pretty much every day since the silkworms have spun cocoons.
Most of the lunas have become moths and a lot of them have mated so this project has gone full circle! I have more eggs than I can count now!

Some More Measurements

The Lone Ranger began to spin on day 45 :) and he was 2 in.

but so was my dubernardi. I think it's a bit fatter than my other luna though.

silkworms also spun at about 2 1/2 inches

while collecting food a couple days ago, I found this cocoon and I was so excited until i realized that the silk was really odd, i could feel the pupae inside and wild moths have this tendency to get parasitized very commonly. So I investigated further, and it turned out to be a spider's home with it's egg sac... blech! I keep meaning to set it free but i keep forgetting... it gives me the chills tho but i'm glad i decided to look into it.

Some Back Home Stuffs

This week was the first week of my summer class and I wanted to post up some photography stuff that isn't bug related :)

My first glass collodion wet plate image! looks like crap though haha. The emulsion wasn't coated on evenly, during the drying process it peeled, the development is crappy and all drippy and the varnish has crap in it... and it's still a really pretty object haha. If you can't tell what it is, it's a tire in a garden. Hopefully in the near future I'll have my own brownie camera. I'm actually looking at a couple on ebay so i can convert one into glass plate cameras.

here's a tile portrait of my friend erin. I took this image when i was home a couple weeks ago. so are the following images. absolutely horrible scan quality so they're not done images. this tiled image i need som feedback on:
my perty girlfriend allie
my musician friend sam
erin again

EMERGENCE DAY!

Nerd Alert! TODAY IS EMERGENCE DAY!!!

First luna has emerged! Now I have successfully reared a luna moth! Now it will only have the week to survive as it doesn't have a mouth to eat with or a stomach to digest.
It's been crawling all over me since I've been home to watch it :D. My girlfriend, Allie took these awesome pictures :)
fat dubernardi. getting to be 30 days and somewhere between 1-1.5 inches.

while waiting outside of work for someone to let me into the prep lab, I drew Sue from the balcony

The other day I was taking holga images the other day and while i was advancing film, i remembered this disney short about taking up photography. When winding film into the camera it takes a little while but i wish it were as exciting as animated as it is in this cartoon. For the most part all that's in this short is true about film photo. enjoy :)

The Lone Ranger

I'm slightly worried that my caterpillar images are getting old... on the other hand, this is a lot for my benefit just to keep track of things.

This guy below is The Lone Ranger. He's the last standing luna that has yet to spin a cocoon and I believe he's also getting to be the biggest one at 2 1/2 in. fully stretched. Also day 40 for this guy.

cecropias sooooooo big! day 39
Day 28 for inch long dubernardi
silk worms are probably around an inch long too
So the other day i decided to separate all the cocoons but then realized that they made the most beautiful collage like compositions. So here's a sneak peak at a very large photo set that will probably be ready soon but would rather show people in person at fall art sale!


At work today I saw a Vietnamese beetle and it made me happy :)
I've been staring at bug labels all day but i realized how interesting some people's tiny handwriting is. More often the labels are typed though so that's not quite as exciting. Makes me wish I'd been photographing the labels as I see em. The ones below are labels for a butterfly I photographed for the museum a while ago.

I've also decided to photograph the inside of freezers for my 30 day photo book project! I like the idea of seeing what people like to preserve in their freezers. The Field Museum has a freezer filled with stuff that has nothing to do with food and mine contains mostly tupperwares of insects and things that need freezing haha. My girlfriend keeps books in her freezer to kill booklice so that's a really cool freezer lol. It's a somewhat serious project. I didn't want to take the project too seriously but didn't want it to be a joke either. I'd love to know what people think so any feedback would be great!

Back in da City

So I'm finally back with quite a bit to say. So much has happened in the last week and I'm not entirely sure where to start. As far as my artist practice goes, I've got a ton of portraits that need developing, and I've collected a fair amount of oddities that need photographing. All this stuff I'll try to post up as soon as I can.

So my luna's pretty much all spun cocoons :D except for 3 and they're all about the same size as when i left. 1 was actually spinning when i left but none died!

half couldn't find leaves to spin with so i have a ton of cocoons stuck on the sheet of paper on the bottom. I hope they're alright. They spun around a lot of poop and debris.
3 spun on the walls of the cage i had them in and they peeled off pretty easy but this one is pure silk

1 pupae fell out of its cocoon but i'm pretty sure it'll be ok as long as nothing eats it and it stays warm. Looks pretty awesome

cecropias got massive! about 5 died tho...

The dubernardis are pretty big too. They got about an inch long and super hairy

Yesterday on the train I finished Picture of Dorian Gray. It's pretty interesting in concept and fun to think about in terms of the arts but all in all the story and characters were just ok. Images on the internet of Albright's painting are pretty terrible reproductions. Fortunately SAIC has it! So pretty soon I'm going to go in and compare it with everything from the book. I'll give a few more words on it after I visit the painting in person.