Wideangle Common Darter

This summer I have enjoyed showing insects in their environment using my Tokina 35mm macro lens, as may have become evident from earlier posts.

Here are 2 more examples of this style of photography. They show a female Common Darter dragonfly photographed at a local nature reserve on a cool, blustery day. The cool conditions meant the dragonfly was approachable and the cloud cover provided some nice soft light, great for showing off dragonflies' wings. The wind was a pain and so I had to carefully time my shots between gusts but I was quite pleased with how these 2 turned out.

 PLEASE CLICK TO ENLARGE IMAGES

Badger Cull

While there's no denying that TB in cattle is a serious problem, an objective, dispassionate, review of the evidence suggests that culling badgers is unlikely to be the solution and could even make it worse. Despite this, the government has decided to begin such a cull with the aim of removing at least 70% of all badgers in target areas.

If you oppose this cull then please sign the government petition below:

Stop the Badger Cull

Meet Your Neighbours: Damselflies 2

Following on from this previous post, here is another selection of damselflies photographed this summer for the Meet Your Neighbours project.

PLEASE CLICK TO ENLARGE IMAGES

First an Azure Damselfly close-up:

and another dew-covered Azure damselfly:

a male Emerald Damselfly:

and a female Emerald Damselfly:

and a male Emerald Damselfly close-up:

and, finally, a Large Red Damselfly:

BWPA 2012

I'm very pleased to say that my image below has been Highly Commended in the 2012 British Wildlife Photography Awards (BWPA). The image is of a Brown Hawker dragonfly taken early in the morning with a fisheye lens. It features in the 'Habitat' category of the competition.

These awards are a great showcase of both British wildlife and British wildlife photography and I'm looking forward to attending the awards ceremony next week. My image will feature in the BWPA book and in various exhibitions around the country, starting at the Mall Gallery in London.

The winning images and a small selection of the Highly Commended images can be found on the BWPA website

PLEASE CLICK ON IMAGE TO ENLARGE

Dew Covered Dragonfly

In a recent post I described an early morning shoot in July that took place in very damp, misty conditions. These conditions resulted in a heavy dew that covered plants and insects alike in millions of tiny water droplets. In addition to the Small Skipper butterfly featured in that previous post, I was also fortunate to find a Common Darter dragonfly whose wings really showed off the dew to full effect.

The following images were taken over the space of about an hour with the amount of dew declining over that period as the sun slowly burned through.

PLEASE CLICK ON IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM

All images taken with a Tokina 35mm macro lens (on a Canon 7D)

Onwards and Upwards: 1st Birthday

Well, it's been almost exactly a year since I started this blog so time for a little reflection and a few statistics.

Since the blog was started I've added 80 posts (that's one every 4.5 days!) and there have been approximately 10,000 different visitors from all around the world, creating 20,000 page loads. I'm sure that some photographers' blogs are clocking up these sort of figures every month but, for a fairly niche macro blog, I am more than happy with this level of interest.

I've tried to provide a mix of techniques and new images and will generally continue in this manner, though if readers would ever like to see something different please do let me know. I have made a conscious decision to avoid posts on political or contentious topics (e.g. hunting), not because I don't have views on these topics - far from it - but because they inevitably attract those with extreme views and things can quickly turn unpleasant. So far, therefore, I have only posted on purely photographic topics. Whether I can resist the urge to vent steam on a contentious topic for another 12 months remains to be seen :-)

So, thanks for the interest and I hope to continue adding posts on a regular basis over the coming months and beyond.

PLEASE CLICK TO ENLARGE IMAGE

A snail is probably not the best subject to illustrate the meteoric rise and general dynamism of this blog :-) but I couldn't find another image to capture the onwards and upwards theme :-D

Dew Covered Butterflies

On a Saturday morning in July I decided to have an early start at a local nature reserve having been encouraged by the forecast of cool temperatures and no breeze. I arrived on-site by around 5:30 AM and found the pools and reedbeds to be covered with a heavy, damp mist. At first I thought there was actually too much mist and was fearing foggy images lacking in contrast, but within only a few minutes the sun was starting to burn through. I quickly found a number of insects, all of which were completely covered in tiny water droplets.  This not only made them very attractive but also meant they were very cool and hence were happy to pose for me.

PLEASE CLICK ON IMAGES TO ENLARGE THEM

Here are a couple of images of a Small Skipper butterfly. The first was photographed with the sun behind me;

The second was photographed into the sun and hence backlit;

Finally, a Ringlet butterfly;

It's worth pointing out that sometimes you have to treat the presence of water droplets on an insect with a degree of scepticism as some photographers will on occasion spray droplets onto their subjects to give them a dew-covered look. I've even heard some photographers query whether you ever actually find naturally dew-covered insects. I hope these images illustrate that in the right conditions you can find insects naturally covered in fine water droplets.

Over the next week or two I will post some images of other insects that were even more heavily dew laden, including damselflies and a dragonfly. [EDIT: here are those images]

As an aside, I decided to repeat the exercise only a few days later and returned to the same site at a similar time but found that there was no dew at all. I'm no meteorologist but I assume the overnight temperatures were too high, combined with a slight breeze. My heart sank as I was greeted by the sight of Emerald Damselflies on the wing at 5:30 in the morning, something I have never seen before, signalling that my early start had been in vain.