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A bit of garden wildlife
You don’t have to go to exotic places to see fascinating wildlife. Sometimes it’s there in your own back garden/back yard. We have a wheelbarrow stored upside down in our garden. On lifting it recently my wife found these two Common toads (bufo bufo) side by side. We’ve seen individuals before, but two together was unusual. She called me over and I, of course, went and got my OM-1 camera with my OM System 60mm macro lens. A quick focus-stacked set and they were captured for posterity. Sweet! On a Scabious flower just yards away some real drama was playing out. The female Flower Crab spider had previously caught a…
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Spring has sprung
It’s nearly May, and here in leafy Worcester everything wild is going at a very rapid pace. The birds are singing like mad, and creatures like toads are well out of hibernation. I found this one perched on top of an old tree stump in the garden. The stump is covered by our wheelbarrow – upside down – and I’ve seen a toad on the tree stump before. I had my OM System 40-150 Pro lens fitted, which was perfect for an informal portrait. The eyes are good and sharp, which is an important thing in portrait photography. I’ve been experimenting with capturing small insects in flight. It’s really hard…
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60mm plus 30mm = 90mm
They say that “nature’s red in tooth and claw”. That indicates that everything is struggling to survive against lots of potential predators. I saw this little vignette happening outside one of our windows. A honey bee was caught in a spider’s web. The spider is probably a Noble False Widow, and it was just doing what spiders do to carry on living. I shot through the double glazing with my 60 mm OM macro lens. The background is well out of focus, as it was quite a long way away. Later the bee and spider were to be seen tucked up in the corner of the window, almost out of…
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March miscellany
Recently I travelled to Jersey for a few days to judge the photography section of the annual Jersey Arts and Crafts Eisteddfod. It was an honour to be chosen as Adjudicator, and I was well looked after by the organisers. I was kept very busy writing individual assessments for each image, so I didn’t have much chance to see the sights. I was able to pop out early one morning and visit the harbour in St Helier. One striking thing was the sculpture called “Jersey Girl” at Liberty Wharf. It’s by an artist called Rowan Gillespie, and was unveiled in 2010. Very cleverly she is suspended by cables from just…
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Helios – and a sunflower
A few weeks ago we went to to Coventry to see the Helios art installation. To quote from the National Trust’s website, “Helios, a seven-metre sculpture of the Sun, has been created by artist, Luke Jerram. It’s been made from 400,000 photographs of the Sun’s surface and observations by NASA to replicate swirling solar winds and sunspots.” This installation was outside in the garden of Charterhouse, Coventry, and it was fascinating to see how people interacted with it. I used the wide-angle lens on my Pixel phone to get a good view of the differences between those who chose the sun and those who chose the shade. There’s a bit…
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Sex and drugs and rock & roll.
OK, I accept that there is a distinct absence of drugs and rock & roll, but there’s definitely some sex. I was watering the garden a couple of days ago and saw a movement on the hose. Looking closer I realised it was a pair of mating Scarlet Tiger Moths. They get their name from their bright red underwings. I rushed off and set up my flash diffuser and macro lens, hoping they would still be there when I came back; they were. I had to lie on the ground in a quite uncomfortable position to get the shot, but we suffer for our art don’t we? I was able…
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I spied a spider – or four
OK, I know they aren’t insects, as the tags might have you believe, but spiders are great subjects, as long as you can get close enough to them. One of my favourites, as we see them round the house a lot, is the Fleecy Jumping Spider. They are really very small. Females, like this one, can reach just 5mm long. I’ve used my Cygnustech flash diffuser to give lots of soft light, and focus-stacked nine images to give better depth of field. This one’s on a vertical white-painted wall. This one’s on the same wall, but I lit it with an LED torch almost parallel to the wall’s surface to…
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Macro musings – Part the Second
I’ve recently purchased a Cygnustech flash diffuser to help with my macro photography. It came from Australia pretty quickly, and was custom-made for my flash, lens, and camera body setup. My home-made diffuser was OK, but not quite good enough. One of the issues with using an on-camera flash for close-up/macro photography is that the direction of the flash is wrong, as the light mostly goes past the subject. The other issue is that light from a bare flash head is very directional and gives hard shadows and specular reflections. For shiny insects that’s not good lighting. The diffuser solves the problems by directing the light to the subject and…
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Macro musings
I’m running a couple of Macro photography workshops for a local photographic club soon, so what better subject than that for today’s blog post? At the workshop I will demonstrate how everyday objects are perfect subjects for Macro images. Here’s an example of such an everyday object. It’s the hook part of a Velcro strap on a wrist support I was wearing. I used a head torch behind the Velcro as my light source and this gave a cool spotlight look to the image. To my mind there’s a bit of “Blade Runner” grime/abandonment to it. The direction that the light comes from makes a huge difference to images. This…
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Spring has sprung
Spring has most definitely sprung here in Worcester, notwithstanding all the rain we’ve had. One thing that’s happened locally is that the Cathedral has restarted tower visits after a four year hiatus. I was the first person to book a tower visit ticket and it’s well worth doing. On the way back down the tower I noticed an overwintered Peacock butterfly that was next to an unopenable window. The butterfly had no chance of getting out without help, so I picked it up between my index finger and thumb and took it carefully down the stairs, through the nave and out into the open. After a minute or so on…