The Magic of Fireflies

Greetings, fellow Steemians!

On the way home from striking out with a particular weather-dependent image I've been trying to capture for months (it'll happen, yet!) I took the back way. the route has little traffic and, with my vision problems, it's preferable. While cruising at about 45 mph I started to see a green hue to the farm fields. It turned out to be more fireflies than I've ever seen in one place before!

There weren't any good side-roads to pull off on, and the shoulder was rather narrow, but I eventually found a gravel road. It was so dark that I had to manually focus, but I did manage to get this image. the distant storm clouds were barely visible to the naked eye, but added a little interest to the shot.

ISO 3200, f/5.6, 15 second long exposure on tripod

For those of you who do not have or have never seen fireflies, they are a rather large insect which can create its own light through a biological process known as bioluminescence.

Because the image above is re-sized for the blog, it loses a lot of the firefly light. Here is a link to the higher-res image. My old original version EOS 7D is only has 18 MP and struggles in low light. I can only imagine how this would have turned out with a 5D Mark IV...

The fireflies dance of light appears to have three distinct styles. The long lines in the image are produced with a slow, sustained light that lasts up to several seconds. The vast majority, instead of this long burst, emit a single flash that only lasts a fraction of a second. These are all but impossible to see in the reduced image. The third, and rarest, of the bioluminescence styles is a rapid flashing. Here are some very cropped portions of the image, to illustrate this.

100% crop top-left of image

With a full-frame sensor from this decade, the clouds and background would be much smoother.

100% crop top center-left of image

While idyllic in the image, I highly recommend mosquito netting and a couple bottles of spray. I was positively swarmed while taking this image. It was worth the blood loss, itchy bites, and possible West Nile infection, though!

Thank you for taking a look! If you enjoy my work, please up-vote. Re-steems and comments, particularly constructive criticisms, are greatly appreciated!