Cucumber Spider

This little spider was hiding in one of the seed heads that I cut down in the garden and made a perfect model to try out the 90mm Macro lens. Image 2 is a photostacked image, others are single shots. The only other 'model' I found was a Blowfly and demonstrates the incredible sharpness of the lens.

Wider Angle Macro

 As my 60mm macro stopped focusing suddenly and seems to be permanently, I tried my 18-45 mm lens with the Raynox close-up filter. Here a few examples of what is still active in my Cambridge garden. Most taken at the 45mm end but the Cricket and Flower spider were at the 18mm end.

Macro at Paxton

 Yesterday we had a Macro day at Paxton for Volunteers and were lucky with the weather - mainly bright and not too windy especially in the morning. Several wasp Spiders located - this one has a Dark Bush Cricket prey. Other favourites were the Vapourer moth caterpillar, the Green Leaf Hopper and the various stages of the Dock Bug. Large numbers of Migrant Hawkers on the wing and pleased to photograph for the first time a Small Red-eyed Damselfly

In the Eye of a Grass Snake

Came eye-to-eye with this grass snake while hunting for mining bee nests in the meadow. Knowing they are harmless other than excreting a foul odour, I enjoyed photographing the snake while it sampled the air with the tongue. I even had time to do a focus stack of it (last two images) before it disappeared into longer grass.

Exploring Macro at Botanic Gardens

We had a day at the Botanic Gardens in Cambridge yesterday in rather poor light. I spent the session before lunch showing a new member the techniques that are available for macro. I was using an Olympus with 60mm macro so explored both straight shots with as small aperture as was possible in the low light (image 1,2 ,12, 13), with focus bracketing (third, fourth images - 30 images processed in Zerene Stacker) and also with the in-camera stacking of 8 images that my model can do (rest of images).

Macro at Paxton Pits

 Decided to do a bit of focus-stacking practice on subjects in Rory's Wood at Paxton. Found a couple of definite slime moulds, plus some 'oddities'.