Grasshoppers

I always enjoy photographing grasshoppers, not least because I find their faces to be very expressive. One of my photographic goals this summer was therefore to take a grasshopper portrait for the Meet Your Neighbours project.

I find grasshoppers reasonably easy to photograph as long as the weather is fairly cool and/or it is early in the morning or late in the evening. Some grasshoppers will simply jump away as soon as you approach but, if you're careful and move slowly, others will be surprisingly confiding. After a few unsuccessful attempts with uncooperative grasshoppers, the individual below posed nicely for me for a few frames (as ever, I then let it go about its business).

These images are of Common Green Grasshoppers (Omocestus viridulus):

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More Dew-Covered Common Darter Images

Following on from this post, here are a couple more images of a heavily dew-covered Common Darter dragonfly, this time taken with my Sigma 150mm lens.

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I don't normally like square-cropped images but on this occasion the shape of the subject seemed to suit it:

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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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