Art at Botanic Gardens

 On our CCC trip to Cambridge Botanic Gardens, I was distracted from my initial ideas of leaf shapes etc to take images of the plants as they pushed up against the greenhouse windows and by participants on a Botanical Illustration Day. The first image has been processed through Color Effex; all the others are Lightroom-only adjustments. The Olympus 50mm f1.8 legacy lens makes a wonderful portrait lens - very sharp and yet with a softening effect on the skin tones.

Garden Project 11

 The garden has progressed a great deal in the last two and a half weeks so we now have many species in flower in the wildflower areas of the garden. Our cat enjoys sitting in the wild area at the back of the garden amid the Red Campion.

Spring Sounds and Sights at Paxton Pits

Garden Warblers were definitely the stars of a Dawn Birdwatch at Paxton yesterday, far outnumbering Blackcaps, Whitethroats and Chiffchaffs/Willow Warblers. On Saturday, we did the monthly survey of Dragonflies and Butterflies on a very warm sunny day so mass emergence of Damselflies (Variable, shown here and Common Blues) and plenty of butterflies including a Grizzled Skipper

A Good Year for Bluebells

The Bluebells in the Cambridgeshire/Bedfordshire woods are very impressive this year. Here a few from recent visits - mostly taken with the Olympus legacy 50mm 1.8mm lens so manual focus only. I varied the aperture in some shots and really like the softness of focus and colour that this lens produces.. The last image is with a modern Fuji 80mm macro - the glass results in much more contrast and saturated colours.

Early Purple Orchids

A wonderful display of Early Purple Orchids in our local woods at the moment. A very difficult species to do justice to with its supersaturated colour and always ' messy' surroundings, especially as I prefer to have the flowers with enough detail in the background to show habitat. A very variable species in its colour and petal shape etc.