Making a Difference

 I have been busy with my camera recently which has been nice after a bit of a break and this weekend I have shot 1300 images. Initially for the star trails (see previous post) and then at the Rhyl Air Show and it was my intention to share a few images from the air show today but I realised I still have a few good shots from Sizergh to post and while I will come back to them after I have posted some shots of planes I decided to first go for these bees.

The reason for this choice is because today we gave my grandson a book that was written and illustrated by my very talented niece, all about a bee who felt unimportant. It is a little reminder that just like the bee we are all important and have something to give, we can all make a difference in our own unique way.

Plus I really liked the bold colours and the fine detail in these shots which have a really summery feel. 

Star Light

 This is another first for me, but something I will definitely try again, especially now the nights are darker for longer. I just have to hope for more clear skies.

This is a circular star trail (the second image is cropped to remove some of the distracting foreground) taken in the Forest of Bowland last night.

It is a stacked image using 135 individual  30 second exposures so in all this is a 70 minute exposure  which I shot over a 2 hour 20 minute time period.

Next time I will use a shorter period between shots and use a higher number of images to hopefully create even smoother more complete trails.

In the cropped image I have adjusted the colour density a little to bring out some of the colours that we would normally not see.

These are Hideous!

 I am not going to try to pretend that these are anything but hideous. On a hot day out in the countryside I am always plagued by flies and biting insects which  drive me mad, but that doesn't stop me from finding them fascinating. They are quite ugly too, but again that doesn't stop me from finding them interesting as subjects to photograph. I think it is because up close there is so much more to these pesky things. They are really quite complex and when we brush them away as they buzz past we don't ever see the detail.

So every now and then I do like to pause for a moment and take a closer look. It doesn't make them look any better and I still get annoyed every time they buzz around me but I do try to appreciate them a little more, as part of the complexity of nature and the fact that annoying as they are they still have a role to play.

Hen Borth

 

Just one picture today, it is an image I have worked on this afternoon, trying hard to get it right.

I collected these pebbles from the beach at Hen Borth in Anglesey and originally I photographed them in the boot of my car while I was camping nearby on Friday night. I took the original photo using my mobile phone and I thought it looked really cool. I wanted to print it and hang it on  my wall but no matter how I cropped it or tried to resize it I couldn't get it to fit properly. It was so frustrating and after a while I had to give up. 

That's when I decided to recreate the image, this time using my DSLR and framing the stones a little better. I had to clean out the boot of the car from some of the dirt and grass left over from the camping trip and then referring to the original picture on my phone I organised the stones as closely as possible to how they were first time round, I took three shots using different settings and then selected this one. I had to do some spot removal in lightroom to tidy up the image. I then adjusted the shadows and brought out the blue tones to match with the colour theme of the other pictures this will hang with. I am really pleased with the result and I hope you will agree this picture is a real winner and so worth the effort I went through to create it. It is definitely too good not to share!

Pollination

 If you look closely at these images of a Honeybee and the Meadow Cranesbill you will see how important the bee is to pollinating the plants and flowers. You can see the tiny grains of pollen dusting the back of the bee, clinging to its hairs and also on the petals and the stamen of the flower.

The other thing I want to comment on in the first picture is the bees wings, they are shiny and clear but in some of the "panes" there is a small pattern. I call them "panes" because the wings look like stained glass or leaded  windows. So delicate and beautiful.

Feed Me! Now!!!

 A few days ago I went to visit Sizergh Castle in Cumbria. It was an interesting day to be sure. I took some rather nice shots of the castle itself as well as some of the flowers and insects in the gardens. I also spent some time watching this group of hungry young swallows, lined up along the ridge of an old cottage, and their harassed parents trying to keep up with the constant demands for food.

For this series of shots I was on the wrong side of the building as I was shooting into the sun and so I will start by using that as an excuse for the images being less sharp than I had hoped, even shooting at 1/5000 sec. Nevertheless I think the series as a whole tells a nice story. There were a couple of families of birds lined up and each time an adult bird flew in all the young would cry out demanding to be fed next. Sometimes they would sit waiting but more often than not they would leap up into the air to get their parents' attention and snatch the tasty bugs from their beaks. The parent birds never settled down, each food exchange was done on the wing and as quickly as they flew in they would swoop off again in the hunt for more food.