Just a few photos here of my brothers birthday cake. Due to his sick bee fetish, his wife made him a whole hive. Continue reading for more.

Surprise bee is surprised.

Ok, so not totally. But Aperture, baby, you got me down. I love your organization, your free form workflow, your cute little icon in my dock. But I have grown increasingly annoyed at some issues with image quality and today I am sorely disappointed in your RAW decoding.

The problem seems to occur when an over exposed image has a smooth fall off into a normally exposed area causing posterizing around the highlight area. It is most noticable in certain tonal ranges as we see. The worst part is Adobe Camera Raw has non of these problems, neither does DPP(canons raw decoding software). It turns out that the problem is also noticable in OSX's Finder previews, but to a much lesser degree. This seems to imply to me that the problem goes beyond just Aperture, and is applicable to everything that uses Apples Camera Raw decoding. It also means Aperture is doing something special in addition, which is exacerbating the problem. One can only speculate as to any other issues that Aperture has with image proccessing...

Oh, no need for speculation. I am starting a list to keep on stand by I think.

Higher res jpeg_examples available.

Out of all of the antlions Ive held Ive never been bitten. Those mandables look a bit...larger up close.

I caught this fella right as he finished building his web in the morning. I took video as he was finishing building, then this series of photos after he finished. Species is G. cancriformis, which is a common spiny spider local to florida.

Click read more for the rest of the set!

Good close up here of him waiting for breakfast. Funny enough a couple flys hit the web while I was shooting, and non of them stuck.

A couple forms of fungus growing on decayed wood. Taken at four times life size.

Turns out this little guy is just called a common household gecko. A little disappointing really. They should have named it the Peruvian chicken eating gecko or something. Not because it is more descriptive, but would make for a better name I think.

Withering grass, drying in the air. Taken with a reversed 18mm.

In other news, Ill hopefully be updating more since I have been working out most of the kinks in wordpress. Oh look a new version of wordpress was just released. *eye roll*

I wonder if the spider misses its one leg as much as I would.

Finally for release. The Southern Blocks by Young Egypt.

You can visit Young Egypt at http://www.youngegypt.org/.

Edit: Now in HD!

Here is Phil of Young Egypt, you can find them at http://www.youngegypt.org/.

Click read more for some more portraiture and shots of them preforming at the show.

Pre-show sitting around. Productivity is key.

During the show, preforming the song "The Southern Blocks"

Another shot during the performance of "The Southern Blocks".