Elephant Hawkmoth Caterpillar

Always exciting to find these very large caterpillars in the garden - feeding on the Greater Willowherb. I decided to practise my focus stacking on them. I used pegs to hold a branch of the plant upright and away from the plant to give a simple background. The first stack is 30 images with an LED continuous light at the front - not enough to have the flower in focus as well the caterpillar; the second is 45 images and has the light a bit further away and from the top so the stem is now defined

UEA, A Brutalism Megastructure

The University of East Anglia campus was designed by Denys Lasdun and constructed in 1970.  The teaching block is a long, winding ribbon with copper hued windows. The horizontals are broken up by concrete housed vents and lift shafts jutting above the roofline. The library and students’ union building are an arrangements of boxes that continue the horizontal thread. The campus is completed by the student accommodation, the ziggurats seen through the sculpture in the infrared images. connected to the rest by long concrete walkways. 

Sainsbury Centre in Infrared

I spent Thursday afternoon around the Sainsbury Centre and the UEA site with my Sony RX IR-converted camera. Lots of great shapes and skies to play with in and around the Centre.

 

Four members of CCC visited the Sainsbury Centre for Arts at Norwich UEA yesterday to view the Exhibition of Bill Brandt and Henry Moore's work. A very interesting exhibition showing the friendship and mutual inspiration of the two artists through the war years and beyond. The exhibition and the surrounding are very monochromatic so I spent a little time at the end injecting colour into the surrounding with multiple exposure and then continued this in the afternoon around the campus.

Chalkhill Blues

This appears to be a good year for Chalkhill Blues judging by the numbers at Sharpenhoe and Royston. Here a mass of butterflies visiting ?Badger droppings for minerals, some studies of the males and females plus a couple of Six-spot Burnet moth with cocoons.

 

Ultra Closeup on Garden Life

One of my projects in recent months has been trying to record and identify the very small insects that live in my garden. Here I was using a supplementary lens on the front of my 80mm Fuji lens plus 2X extender giving just over 2:1 magnification. The first fly is around 2mm in length. The difficulty is keeping the camera still - tripod isn't possible as the subjects are very restless and the plants move!!