Banded Demoiselles and White-legged Damsels

As well as Banded Demoiselles, I caught a few of the White-legged Damselflies in flight. They have very blue eyes. The male Banded Demoiselles sit around on perches or reeds waiting for the females and then they will pounce on her on the water and often look as if they will drown her in their enthusiasm.

High-Contrast IR Cambridge

These are taken with my converted Sony RX100, which works well in high-contrast condition converted to monochrome. I intended to concentrate on shadows but one or two other scenes distracted me like the Cath Kitson empty window. 

Marbled Whites - Dawn Focus Stacks and Windy Evening Shots

The advantage of having Marbled Whites almost on the doorstep is that I can photograph whenever the conditions look right for interesting shots as with these dawn shots after a heavy dew. They are Focus stacks of 30 images done as a focus bracket on the Fuji X-T2 with a tripod and stacked with Zerene Stacker. I was using an 80mm macro lens with 2X converter at f2.8. Similarly for the Southern Hawker emerging from our pond but here no tripod so have missed the front focal plane of the shed larval case. Other images for my record of species and dates were from last night in a stiff breeze but good to see male and female Marbled Whites, an Essex Skipper and a Ringlet sheltered in the foliage - all single shots with 100-400 mm lens. 

Pinhole views of Cambridge

Armed with my third (and final) version of a pinhole 'lens' I had a walk round Cambridge in the bright sunlight yesterday morning. We were surprised how empty Cambridge still is despite free the inevitable long exposure time makes including people a bit hit and miss! I do like the old degraded celluloid look of the images and the lens is ultralightweight.

Bedfordshire Damsels and Dragons

We spent a very enjoyable day photographing Banded Demoiselles (males shown first then females), Large Red Damselfly, Ruddy Darter, White-legged Damselfly  and Blue-tailed Damselfly. I was trying to get flight shots which proved very difficult - I will share a few in a future post.

Lockdown Ballet Classes

Bourn School of Ballet have been having their classes outdoors on a hard tennis court (with suitable matting!) to comply with social distancing. Oonagh needs some photos for the new website she is having so yesterday I spent some time in the bright sunlight taking photos of the girls going through routines. Very difficult backgrounds and lighting - all previous shoots have been in a white walled sunlit hall giving beautiful pastel shots - so I have made more use of shadows and contrast in these few out-takes. In the finished images all the backgrounds will have to be taken to black or the subjects transferred to white settings so quite a task!