Toft Insects Including First Damselfly of 2022

First Large Red Damselfly today (compares well with 2020 - April 13th but much earlier then 2017 - April 28th and 2021 April 24th ). Other insects -two hoverfly species, a Red Velvet Mite, 3 species of Hemiptera and a House fly and Midge.species.  

Garden Project 10

It is now 2 years since I started my wildlife garden and the various areas: front meadow with cowslips, pond with marigolds, woodland with Yellow Archangel and Fritillarias and the back wildflower beds with Red Campion, Hedge Garlic etc all  appear to be fairly stable. The bee hotel is very active with dozens of Osmia bicornis.

Hardwick Wood and Caldecote Church

 Our Cambridge Camera Club (and RPS Nature Group) outing was to have been to Waresley Wood but this was closed until the day so we relocated to Hardwick Wood, which in many ways is a better venue. It is certainly at its best and has the finest displays of  spring flowers for several years with all the species out together. Paul and I visited Caldecote Church meadow at the end for the Fritillarias and also a couple of bees. I was using mixture of focus stacking with the X100v and single shots with the 80mm macro. The bees are with the X100V (23mm). The third shot is with a legacy Olympus lens - I love the softness of this but found it too difficult to manually focus in the bright and contrasty light.  Last shot shows some of the group in situ!!

Hardwick Wood Focus on Flowers

I spent a morning in Hardwick Wood last week trying to perfect my technique for focus bracketing  using Fuji X100V  i.e. aperture, focus point, number of shots, distance lens moves between shots etc (images 1-4,6 are stacks) . Not sure I am a lot further forward as still a degree of hit and miss as regards the different parameters including light on the subject - the sun made a brief appearance during the second image plus an LED front light. Other images employed shallow depth of field

Mallory Park

A few images from Mallory Park Historic Motocycle Racing. Unfortunately the meeting was cut short by an accident so I only shot from one position with no experimentation on shutterspeed, backgrounds or light direction.