salmobytes

............

WZ-40

Right Pheasanttail The tails are a bit too long and the abdomen a bit too skinny. But it's not a bad baetis nymph as it is. The real bug is a Baetis Nymph netted in April '13, Montana's Big Horn River. ............this is the World Famous "Right Hackle" technique, only recently beamed down from outer space by alien beings

Same Right Hackle technique as the Black Caddis photo somewhere down below, this time applied to a generic nymph -- flashy dubbing is basted loosely to the underside of the thorax and then glued in place. With thread hanging from the eye wind horizontally underneath and across the bottom of the thorax. Wind over top down and back to the eye again, loosely basting a clump of fibers to the underside of the thorax. Whip finish. Adjust the position of the loosely basted legs. Add a drop of glue (CA glue, UV glue, clear nail polish, water based fabric cement, etc).

We had a thread about closeup fly photos a while back. This fly is resting directly on top of a sheet of 1/8" inch thick translucent white plexiglass, on top of a mirror. The lighting comes from two umbrella strobes. Enough diffused light bounces back up from the mirror to eliminate any shadows from the strobes, so the fly appears to be floating in space. Even though it isn't. The image above is made from 38 separate exposures taken robotically from software (Helicon Remote), from a laptop hooked directly to the camera with a USB cable, so each shot is focused a small incremental difference away from the last shot. ZereneStacker then examines all 38 shots and splices together only the "in focus" portions of each frame. Without software and multiple exposures it's impossible to get this much magnification and this much depth-of-field (everything in focus) at the same time. Focus stacking software for consumers is only a few years old. Five or six years ago images like this weren't possible. Pretty cool stuff.

#20 DaiRiki 125, duck flank and Zelon

Perhaps we've had enuf of this crop

Davie McPhail is bad..................for my productivity. He's a bit too much like the old potato chip commercial: "Bet you can't watch just one"

Hair weave

;=))

Very cool. How did you make the super glossy back?

Excellent photos Flytire. As good as they get. The photo of the Twenty Incher Stonefly really catches my eye. What is your setup? Light tent and incandescent lights? One flash? Two flashes? I like the not-in-focus blue background too.

Not match the hatch with hot hot hot fluorescent orange. Especially in winter

Yes I wrote at least one piece for Dick Surrette, the founder and first owner of Fly Tyer. And then quite a few for Dick Stewart who was the next owner. Wrote a few more articles here and there for other magazines. And then I ..... took another direction. I'm not sure what. But I'm getting ready to fire up the keyboard again soon. First time in over 20 years.

Hip waders might be more appropriate. Don't you think?

I loved showing the teacher he/she had it all wrong. I'm still firing on all cylinders. From the same place. Sixty years later....

The Jellystone is one of the best....snipped out of a Pumpkin colored bass tube and adorned with rubberlegs and Gold Ice Dub. Tied mostly on a beading needles. Slid off the needle and then attached to a weighted hook.

I've been reading Peter Hayes book Fishing Outside the Box. It's interesting but a bit too centered on English chalk stream fishing for me. What about fishing streamers during a snow storm? Nymph fishing in March? Giant stonefly nymphs in dirty water? Grasshoppers in September? Small streamers on Spring Creek afternoons, after the hatch? There is a lot more to fly fishing (for trout) than a lifetime centered around Chalk Stream Duns. Still. It's a fun book. Hayes faults Frederick Halford for being a fool who (in denial, he said) only wanted cast to fish taking "upright duns." Hayes stresses the importance of emergers, which constitute the great bulk of stomach contents, almost entirely excluding real "upright duns." Hayes has a lot of interesting ideas. But most of it boils down to nymphs and adults usually drifting downstream with head oriented upstream (the opposite of the way we usually fish) and the relative importance of emergers over upright duns. But Hayes somewhat defuses the implied importance of emergers by asserting most traditional dry flies quickly break the surface tension and become good emerger patterns anyway. So. OK. Emergers are more important than upright duns but thinking outside the box tells us our traditional patterns are really emergers anyway. So what is the punchline point? I'm enjoying the book but I'm still trying to figure that out. Hayes has a few patterns at the end of the book including a PHD Dun (peter hayes dun) that amounts to novel twist on the parachute idea. I like it. I'll try it soon. But in the mean time it got me thinking about emergers. I've posted photos of my Ducktail Mayflies before, which are essentially the following fly, except this one is meant to half sink, rather ride. So here I use beaver underfur and Crystal Flash for hackles instead of Zelon or Snow Shoe Rabbit's foot. One clump of duck flank forms body and wing. A tuft of beaver under fur mixed with a few twists of Crystal Flash are fastened underneath, tied in the "Right Way," which means a figure 8 from the base of the tail up to the eye and then back again loosely bastes the legs in place on the bottom of the thorax. A dab of glue then holds the hackles permanently. I tied one more (second image below) with a single twist of starling as a comparison. Winding a traditional hackle feather on a #20 scud hook is a heck of lot fussier and more difficult than basting a Right Hackle in place with a single figure 8 wrap. This was an instructive exercise for me. For small mayfly sized wet flies (or dries too for that matter) basting Right Hackles to the bottom of the thorax is a lot easier to master than winding traditional hackle feathers. Looks better too. To my eyes anyway. Shucktail Emerger Shucktail Softie

:=)) Merry Christmas all. I was going to head up into the Park today but..............Mr Blizzaaaaaard is now out in the yard. Snow's coming down sideways. The above little stonefly adult does work well. I fished it quite a bit this summer, in various sizes and colors. I haven't tried making a big salmon fly this way yet. There's a good project. I'll try to work that one in. Here's the Yellow Sally model -- a common early summer stonefly in the Northern Rockies. The nymphs for this stonefly aren't only crawlers, they're outrageously fast swimmers as well.

Medium small Yellow Sally #18 scud hook. Body tied on a beading needle, wrapped and dubbed over the needle, over the stem end of a duck flank feather, with the tips of the duck flank folded back while still on the needle. Slide it off the needle. Mount it on a scud hook. Add hackles underneath tied the Right Way. The hackle fuzz is a mixture of gray Zelon, shrimp colored Ice Dub and dark green Crystal Flash, blended with wool combing cards prior to mounting below the shank.

Ok. I have more confidence--fish catching wise--with synthetic materials, at least in the wet fly context. I'm not sure it matters in the dry fly context. The synthetics have more twinkle and some tend to appear as more transparent than any fur or feathers. Transparent twinkle works for me. Many of my most productive wet flies look less like real insects to me than less productive (and more realistic to human eyes) patterns tied with fur and feathers. What it looks like to me is less important than fish-catching productivity. What are the criteria for wet flies? Cost, availability, uniformity of quality, durability, ease of tying and most of all--strike rate. For wet flies synthetic materials win that contest. For me. :=))

I use a Nikon D7000 (wish I had better but it's good enough) with the Nikor 105mm Macro. It's not a cheap lens. It does allow the camera to be further back from the subject than a 55mm macro, which is convenient. Camera $1000 Lens $1500 How far off the deep end do you want to go? I also use an "extension tube" set which allows pushing the lens further away from the focal plane, which creates more magnification. $280 I once used a light tent made from curtain material, with incandescent lights. It works and it's cheap. But now I use umbrella strobes. The cheapest good ones are about $500 from "Alien Bees" in Canada. You can easily spend $3000 to $5000 on strobes but those are for big studio fashion photography. For tiny fly scene photos Alien Bees is hard to beat. It's handy to put a 16" x 16" inch square of translucent white 1/8" inch thick Plexiglass on top of a mirror. Put the flies on the Plexiglass. The mirror and the white plastic erase any hard shadows from the strobes. Now you don't need a vise, which is nice because vises just clutter up the image. With that background you can make fly images that seem to float in space, as if they weren't resting on a flat surface. Tripod $300 -- $3000 depending on which one you buy Focusing rail $100 -- $2500 (I have the $100 variety) Gimp photo editing software (free) ..... Photoshop is perhaps better. But not cheap. And you have to be an expert to use the parts of Photoshop Gimp does not have. Geeqie software for rapid browsing of large numbers of photos (free) .... from Geeqie you can click to send an image to Gimp Zerene Stacker focus stacking software $80 Helicon Remote software to operate my camera from a laptop $100 or so, for making multiple exposure focus stacks. Apple and Adobe have MacIntosh oriented photo management and photo editing software a lot of people like (IPhoto Lightroom etc). But I don't like them. IPHoto is particularly exasperating because it puts your photos in a software jailhouse that makes them difficult to use with other programs. Lightroom is good but not cheap and not as powerful as Gimp. Lightroom is good amateur-oriented software. Gimp has more horsepower and it's free. And I vastly prefer the free combination of Geeqie and Gimp. And UFRaw if you shoot raw images (much better) rather than jpeg. Some people also like Darktable and Rawstudio, which are also free.

Petroleum off topic? This was a thread about synthetic materials. Astronomy (color shift analysis of radio telescope data, I think) tells us hydrocarbons exist throughout the universe (atmosphere of Jupiter, for instance). So my Emperor's New Intuition tells me hydrocarbons are not produced as a byproduct of complex photosynthetic organisms, which do not exist throughout the universe. Not widespread anyway. Nobel Prize Winner (now dead) Tommy Gold pointed that out. Gold also suggested our hydrocarbons come from anaerobic (don't need oxygen or the sun) bacteria deep in planet's mantle. And that coal and oil are more like a precipitate sludge condensed from seeping methane, produced by anaerobic bacteria. And that complex life on our earth started as simple anaerobic bacteria, rather than complex photosynthetic goo in any nutrient soup nearer the earth's surface. All of which implies anaerobic life exists throughout the universe. All of which conclusively proves that flies made from synthetic fibers are perfectly natural. And that brown trout like to eat streamers during stormy weather. -- Yours, Salmo Non Sequitur

For me, for wet flies I'm biased heavily toward synthetic twinkle. We don't do control group experiments. We all work on hunches and they're easily swayed and guided in mis-directions. So it takes decades to know for sure sometimes. My dad only fished wet flies when the dry fly fishing was off. But then the wet fly fishing is no good either. All of which convinced him, over 40 years of fishing, that wet flies were useless. It was only his last few years of fishing he finally realized what he'd been missing. I'm on a synthetic wetfly roll right now. Especially in winter. Bright and twinkly is best. By a long margin too. I think. Now anyway. .........and looks most natural to human eyes is, perhaps, a seductively misleading measure. What matters most isn't even what the fish sees. It's what the fish does. How many strikes this way compared to that way. Synthetic wins hands down for me. Other side benefits like "always available and uniform quality" help a lot too.