A Walk with Full Spectrum Camera

 I took my Full Spectrum camera (with no added filters) for a stroll around Toft on Tuesday in the sunshine. The Meadow Sweet is in full bloom at the moment and produces really delicate tones with this camera. 90 degrees to the sun seems best for scenes that include sky.

Shoveller Dispute

These two male Shovellers  spent a bit of time eyeing each other before one decided to see off the intruder. He is treading water in the last image flapping the wings in victory.  I hadn't fully appreciated the range of colours in their plumage before. Unfortunately, the light was very harsh and I didn't have a fast enough shutterspeed for this much action!

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St Aidens RSPB Reserve

 St Aidan's RSPB Reserve has been transformed from an old, open cast mine to a reserve with a rich variety of habitats including reedbeds, wetlands, meadows and woodland. It has a breeding population of Black-necked Grebe, which I was keen to see as I hadn't seen summer plumage birds before. There were lots of Bittern booming and several took to the air during our visit. Otherwise the numbers of singing Warblers - Sedge, Reed and Willow were very impressive along with Reed Buntings and all the usual water birds

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.