Celebrate Science Week August 11-19

Celebrate Science Week August 11-19 by joining in the

Great Aussie Bioquest

In our community we are surrounded by some amazing plants, animals and fungi. We have lots of tracks to trek along as well. This makes for a fun adventure to join in for Science Week, The Great Aussie BioQuest, the largest bioblitz in Australia’s history.

Bioquest is run through the QuestaGame App. Your sightings contribute to real research and conservation , it’s free to join and there are even prizes.

All you need is a camera, and it can be the one on your phone or in the app. You don’t need to know what the lifeform is, but you get bonus points if you can identify it.

To better protect life on Earth (including ourselves), we need to learn more about what is out there. So far, we have only described a fraction of the species of life on our planet - and even for those we know of, there is a lot more we can learn about their distribution.

QuestaGamer’s sightings are shared with CSIRO’s Atlas of Living Australia and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility - the world’s premier collection of biodiversity records. As of April 2017, our data has had 50 million record downloads - helping researchers understand how we can better manage and protect biodiversity in a changing world.

This image by John Sharples provides amazing detail of a local Orchid. There are a few tricks to getting an image to look like this...as John explains.

The Acianthus is a small ground orchid some 80mm high. The flower head is about 5 or 6mm high. The size of the flower dictated the type of photography applied; a process known as focus stacking.

To achieve the image a camera was set on a tripod with a macro lens and tethered to a laptop computer. The lens front was some 150mm from the front of the flower with a resulting in focus area, depth of field, of approximately 1 to 1.5mm. The software controlling the camera was set to take 60 images over a focal distance of 15mm. After each image is stored the software inches the camera’s focal distance forward about .25 of a millimetre.

This process takes around 10 seconds per image so about 6 to 10 minutes for the photography and nearer to half an hour for the setup. The 60 images are then taken into the stacking program where the in-focus part of each image is used to slowly build up the final, stacked, image.

After a small amount of cleaning up in Lightroom the flowers were cut out of their natural background and pasted into the uniform dark background you see.
From first observations of the bud to the image before you, I checked the plant over a period of some three weeks and then photographed the plant on four separate occasions plus some 10 or more computer hours to produce the final image.

Unfortunately, the flower head has wilted and a clearer middle image is not possible, but watch this space as a multiple headed stem is in bud. I think it was worth the effort.

Please enjoy.John Sharples