Leicestershire Flowers

This year's recent warm weather has resulted in many of the orchids and Pasque flowers to be past their best but we found enough Pasque Flowers, Water Avens, Cowslips and Early Purple, Man and Green-winged Orchids to enjoy and  photograph.

 

Paxton East Scrub Survey

On Tuesday, our monthly survey was in the East Scrub area at Paxton. Despite the overcast conditions, our group recorded over 100 species of invertebrate in the couple of hours. The area is dominated by nettles - rich in all kinds of insects including one of my favourites - the Speckled Bush Cricket - here a very small first instar with its wonderful stripey legs

Experimenting with Macrotechniques

I have been experimenting trying to find out how many images I need to stack to produce front-to-back sharpness in my small insect images with around f5.6. I concluded that only 7 of the series of 15 images I traditionally use contain any elements that are in focus for my very small subjects so I have been stacking just those frames and get much cleaner images without haloing. I have now set the stack number to 10 though will still only stack those frames with something in focus. With single shots, I tried high aperture number eg f18 or F22 (last 4 images) but the quality certainly falls off when fully closed down (last image). Lucky to have some great models for my experiments particularly the Tachina fera mating pair mating comfortably in a folded leaf and the Dung Fly exuding a droplet of water which is reflecting the spurge flowers it is resting on.

Toft's May Festival

Every year, my village, Toft, holds a Spring Festival, which, on Sunday, included Maypole dancing (even the men were coopted to dance this year) , Dressing the Well and Springling water from branches of Rosemary, a Church Service and Parish tea. This year we had a special Nurturing Nature theme so, on Saturday, we sampled the creatures in the Bourn Brook to get an indication of the state of the water.. There were fewer animals than should be there, confirming the feared high level of pollution, but we did find the larvae of the Green Drake Mayfly, Pond Olive, and Banded Demoiselle. I put up a panel of photos from my Wildlife Garden in the Village Hall display.

Meet Misumena our Macrophotography Model

Yesterday the RPS and CCC Nature Groups held a very informative Macro workshop led by David Smith of OM-Systems. Although he had his own model, Frankie, the Ghost Mantis, I think Misumena 1 and Misumena 2, a couple of flower spiders, stole the show. This is M2 parading rather attractive dark green patches and stripes - excellent for hiding in Meadow Sweet flowers.  They can change colour (not sure of the timescale of the changes) and often those in Buttercups are bright yellow. 

These are mainly single shots at F13-F18 but the last two are an in-camera jpeg stack versus a stack done from Raws in Zerene stacker.