Entries tagged "nature"

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

Half a dozen skylarks, taken across a few different days.

Not always easy to spot (unless perched on a post), but relatively patient subjects, so I figured I'd try using a 1.4x teleconverter on the second visit, requiring manual focus and thus a tripod.

Whilst the birds seemed content to wait around whilst I setup, it was windy enough that focusing was frustrating. I don't know to what degree poor technique/equipment/conditions/luck affected matters, but ultimately the effort involved did not translate to better images, confirming my previous view that the teleconverter isn't worth it.

A male kestrel encountered on my first visit to a local nature reserve.

Image quality isn't the best - I'm a little rusty, so hadn't set the camera to the right settings and my 500mm lens didn't quite have enough reach - but I'm still reasonably happy...

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.

A couple of very striking trees, each presenting different photographic challenges.

For the first, an Autumn Cherry (Prunus subhirtella 'Autumnalis'), the key was finding an angle where the background best complemented its colours, with helpful shadows contributing to emphasise the leaves. (I would have preferred not having the path in frame, but it is hopefully not too much of a distraction.)

With the larger Japanese Maple (Acer palmatum) the consideration was what to keep in frame whilst dealing with the awkwardness of shooting into the light. There was too much movement in the subject for a bracketed exposure, and I settled for a shot with better composition at the expense of the highlights.

I look forward to returning for another attempt at this image at some point in the future.

A heavy downpour had passed through during the afternoon of an otherwise dry day of photography - enough to shelter under a tree and put the camera away, assuming the end of the shoot - but, after the rain stopped the clouds also cleared, and it wasn't long before the sun was shining again. A short while later I encounter these deer. Having no desire to spook them (nor experience their antlers), the telephoto goes on and I get a bunch of shots.

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.

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Photographs frequently use differential focus and sharpness to communicate their subject, but this was an exercise in not doing so.

The images were selected from a shortlist of about three dozen, each deliberately unfocused at time of shooting (because it's not about any individual tree, branch or leaf), with minimal processing performed, reducing distractions, but not removing flaws, because nature isn't perfect.