Entries tagged "insects"

A few male Banded Demoiselles (known scientifically as Agrion splendens or Calopteryx splendens), agile damselflies with butterfly-like flight.

The Hummingbird Hawk Moth (Macroglossum stellatarum), named due to the way it hovers like a hummingbird whilst feeding, and often mistaken for one. (Though the moths are smaller, and wild hummingbirds are not found outside the Americas.)

A complicated subject to shoot: avoiding the wings being too sharp, too blurred, or obscuring the face requires both an appropriate shutter speed and the luck of timing the release to a suitable point in the flapping of the wings.

Combined with the need to manouever around obstacles in an effort to avoid distracting backgrounds, and continually needing to re-focus as the moth erratically darts around (with no obvious method to how it chooses where next to suck nectar from), it wasn't the easiest Lepidoptera to photograph.

These four images were selected from a total of fifteen shots, with shutter speeds between 1/400 and 1/1250.

The first white spider I've seen, this unidentified arachnid is a crab spider, a member of the Thomisidae family. It may be a Misumena vatia - despite having being found out-of-season in late October, and lacking the markings common to that species. It appears that other species of Misumena and related genera (Misumenoides, Misumessus and Mecaphesa) are limited to other parts of the world, and not being an arachnologist I can't be sure what to call it.

I noticed the curious critter seeming to imitate a flower as it swung from a web attached to my arm. I don't know how it arrived there in the first place, but when - upon being lowered to the ground - it chose not to immediately skitter away, I took this as a request to be photographed.

I hope for my next encounter to have a proper macro lens, enabling better quality images.