Wednesday 17th August 2011

Since it looks like I won't be able to sort out my broken camera for a while (I really miss it!), I really have to rise to the challenge of the alternative options and use them in ways they provide good results. My old Ixus can be coaxed into life for a little while as long as it has a newly charged batter in it, so that is preferable to the poorer picture quality of the Kodak. So what does the Ixus do well? Blue skies, colourful objects, and getting in close. Thinking of the latter two, I went to a patch of beautiful flowers I've photographed previously, and took a variety of snaps. A hoverfly was kind enough to enhance this shot, so I chose it as my top shot, although pleasingly I had a few contenders.

4.6mm, 1/500s, f/2.8. (auto)

Friday 5th August 2011

Time to get the caterpillar spray out in the greenhouse! It's a shame to lose a potential butterfly, but on the other hand I don't want to lose my aubergine plants either!

1/40s, f/13, ISO 200

Friday 29th July 2011

Pond skaters are more colourful than I thought!

250mm, 1/200s, f/6.3, ISO 800

Wednesday 20th July 2011

Still working on the grasshopper shoes and I think they're improving, what do you think? I'm now going in search of a certain shot, rather than just trying to photograph grasshoppers close up. Plus this guy had a pretty colourful tail, which helps. At first just taking any photo is hard enough, but after a while you get used to the setup and the subject mannerisms and can start to bring composition into play.

1/60s, f/11, ISO 800

Monday 11th July 2011

More grasshoppers! When I took today's photos I was fairly pleased with them, thought I'd captured everything I wanted in a photo, but when I looked at them on a computer they seem to be looking that special zing, or maybe I've just been taking too many of them. I think I need a bit of a break, no more grasshoppers for a while!

1/100s, f/10 (approx), ISO 800

Friday 8th July 2011

I took a stroll round the lake at the end of my road hoping to find grasshoppers, but there didn't seem to be any around. I took in one more field before heading home, and happened upon some gorgeous salmon coloured damselflies that let me get REALLY close to take photos. I think they were female Common Blues. A spot to return to!

1/250s, f/10, ISO 800

Monday 4th July 2011

I decided it was time to diversify from macro grasshopper shots, although I'm still working on those for a particular photo I'm after. Today, instead, I went to the dragonfly pond at Knypersley reservoir and found a collection of Azure Blues. This one posed for me for a while letting me get right in close, all the others flew off as soon as I got within range for a photo.

1/50s, f/11 (approx), ISO 800

Saturday 2nd July 2011

These small bugs (under a cm long) live in the hedge in my garden, and bit me when I give them their twice yearly trim. This one was crawling over my hand so I put it on the BBQ cover and grabbed the camera. Surprisingly by the time I'd reversed the lens it was still there. I haven't managed to identify exactly it as the red patches and black head are hard to place, but I've got it down to the order Hemiptera, possibly a male Stenotus Binotatus. But more to the point - look at the massive spike it's hiding underneath its thorax!

1/40s, f/10 (approx), ISO 800

Monday 27th June 2011

More grasshoppers!

1/50s, f/10 (approx), ISO 800

Friday 10th June 2011

I've found a wonderful haven of grasshoppers on the wasteland near my office (unfortunately a development site), so I went down after work to entertain passers by with my head and lens to the ground and bum in the air. I'm eager to upgrade my equipment as now I have the subjects I'd really like to improve the quality of the shots. I was trying to get a landscape head shot to submit to the countryfile calendar competition, but this ended up being my favourite one of the set (240 taken, 100 deleted on camera for being blurred, another 100 deleted on computer for being blurred, of those 40 there were 6 I considered good by my current standards).

1/40s, f/10 (approx), ISO 800

Thursday 9th June 2011

An insect that landed on my car window.

1/40s, f/11 (approx), ISO 800

Monday 6th June 2011

This is a yellow dung-fly. I'm fascinated that every time I go out on a bug hunt I see something new, and most of them (the flies at least) are quite easy to identify in the book. It's not perfectly crisp but they don't exactly stay still!

1/40s, f/11 (approx), ISO 800

Wednesday 1st June 2011

This fellow is a leafhopper nymph (at least I think it is!), and it's weensy! If you crouch down and run your hand over a patch of wild grass, and see tiny little flecks jumping about from one blade to another, that's what this is. The image is a bit grainy as I bumped the ISO up to 1600 in my desperation to capture the wealth of insects despite the inadequacy of light, I won't be doing that again!

18mm (approx), 1/60s, f/9 (approx), ISO 1600

Saturday 28th May 2011

Very pleased with this photo! It's some species of grasshopper, haven't quite identified which one as it didn't have wings and all the ones in my book do. I love his little half-smiling, half-coy expression.

[Update - Research tells me that the lack of wings is because this is a grasshopper nymph, i.e. a youngster rather than an adult, also known as a hopper. Grasshoppers go through a series of transformations known as instars, where they moult their shells, before they take their final adult form. Nymphs have fully grown limbs but their wings, colour, body size aren't developed].

70mm (approx), 1/25s, f/11 (approx), ISO 400

Monday 2nd May 2011

I forgot to take a photo today, too caught up with coming home from Scotland. Well, I still *took* a photo - this is me after all, I'm glued to my camera - but it wasn't really a photo-a-day photo, but it'll have to do! So here we are, some unidentified tiny wee eggs found on an unidentified root, unearthed when digging the soil in my greenhouse.

1/100s, f/10 (approx), ISO 400

Saturday 30th April 2011

I was sitting in a cafe with my camera set up for reverse lens macro to take photos of a periodic wasp, when a little green fleck jumped onto my finger. It was such a sunny day that even with an aperture of f/9 or f/10, I got a fast enough shutter speed that the photos came out crisp even though I was hand holding the camera, and some were pleasingly in focus (focus is even harder to obtain hand held when things are magnified). This is my favourite by far because the compound eye seems to be reflecting the colour of the scales. I've identified it as a weevil, although I'm not quite sure whether it's a green nettle, acorn or vine weevil. I was amazed how much detail I could see, so fantastic to be able to see the world in miniature just by looking through a couple of pieces of glass.

18mm, 1/80s, f/10 (approx), ISO 400

Monday 18th April 2011

More reverse lens, of this obliging little fellow. He was less than a cm long, maybe 5mm. I think it might be a robber fly, although my book in insect identification is in the post! With my reverse lens at its closest I could get him to fill the frame but he was too dark, so I had to move back a bit in order to fire the flash. I have photos with more of its body and wings in, but I like the character of this one, where it looks like he's peering over the top of the blade of grass at me (maybe he was!) and it's most reminiscent of this amazing photo which I aspire to.

150mm (approx), 1/10s, f/11, ISO 200

The following photo was taken without the lens reversed for comparison, at its closest focussing distance at full zoom. It also gives a better idea of scale...

250mm (approx), 1/400s, f/6.3, ISO 800

Thursday 14th April 2011

This is more like it! This was a gift of a photo, everything set up just as it was. A daddy long legs curled round a tooth mirror (shame it wasn't on the reflective side!) on the bathroom windowsill, drenched in natural light. I flipped my lens round (with f/11 to ensure enough light for me to see the shot, even if it meant a very shallow depth of field) a took a test photo at 18mm - the creature was magnified so much I only captured its head, and the view was a little dark. Realising I could zoom out, I did so to 250mm (everything works in reverse with the lens reversed) which meant I could get further away, and also that meant the flash worked. With the flash popped up the live view works better, so even better if you don't have to flip it back down again to take the photo. I tried to zoom in on the live view screen to nail the focus better but the subject was wobbling around in the display, so I fetched a tripod and just managed to plant it on the edge of the sink, and then could zoom in to 10x. With mirror lock up and a 2 second timer which finished counting down just as the display stopped oscillating with the movement of my finger press, I got a nice crisp shot. I thought the daddy long legs might be dead as it didn't stir when I moved the tootbrush holder further and further back so I could get more of the creature in (this is actually one of the closer shots, as the further back ones lost the blue background of the toothbrush tube), and I felt a little like I was cheating and a little gruesome. However when I rotated the mirror inside the pot to get the blue background back it had enough and scarpered off up the window. But I had a shot that I liked!

250mm (I think), 1/6s, f/11, ISO 400