Monthly Archives: August 2012

A Perfect Getaway

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Kauai from the air

Yesterday I posted a shot taken in August 2009.  In August 2008, we were somewhere rather different.  Our trip to Hawaii has to be one of the most memorable holidays we have enjoyed so far.  And one of the stand-out highlights was the helicopter flight over the beautiful Garden Isle, Kauai.  This view is of the Na Pali coast, which recently featured as the setting for a surprisingly good thriller, A Perfect Getaway.  We didn’t meet any crazed serial killers on our trip, thankfully.  The helicopter ride was thrills enough!  If I am ever lucky enough to go back, I want to do the doors-off flight. Now that’s one thing I never thought I would say.

 

Holly Blue

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butterfly on verbena

 

I was pleased to bag a shot of a tiny Holly Blue butterfly in my garden this morning, having chased a Brimstone around without success.  The butterflies and bees love verbena bonariensis – such a reliable self-seeder here and conveniently at head height for photographers with dodgy backs!

A non-buggy post tomorrow, I promise!

Green shield bug

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palomena prasina

palomena prasina (spring adult)

This fine fellow is a common green shield bug.  Shield bugs belong to the order hemiptera, whose members have a rostrum, or sucking beak, which they stick into plants.  The common green is the most plentiful in my part of the world.

fifth instar of palomena prasina

final instar, kindly demonstrating rostrum

There are five nymph stages.  I think the little ones are really quite cute.

palomena prasina second instar

second instar – cute or what?

palomena prasina third instar

third instar

There are several other varieties of shield bug that frequent our neighbourhood.  I think this next one may be a hawthorn shield bug (acanthosoma haemorrhoidale).

acanthosoma haemorrhoidale

Hawthorn shield bug? Maybe

But as green shield bugs change colour in the autumn, when this was taken, this one may just be another palomena prasina, teasing me.

So that’s the natural history done, now on to the art, which is what interests me most.  The following is another version of the second instar shot.

second instar green shield bug in grass

An instar’s world

I like this one better than the portrait crop I showed earlier.  I like showing the instar as a small point within its (rather attractive in my opinion) grassy world.  But a suggestion I often hear is that I crop closer with my bug shots.  What do you think?  All opinions very welcome.

The best tree

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flowersThese lovely flowers belong to the best thing in my garden, a thirty foot eucryphia tree. It is columnar, with a semi-weeping habit, and evergreen. So already it earns its place as a good garden tree. But, as if that weren’t enough, every July/August, it bursts forth in a froth of large white blooms, with pretty pink anthers, and a sweet scent.

And, best of all, the honey bees love it. In fact, the children call it ‘bee tower’. The garden thrums with the sound of happy bees.



Eucryphia pollen is very fine indeed, little more than dust. The bees look as if they have been sugar frosted as they go about their business.


At times, they are almost frenetic, as if frantic to collect and preserve this bounty while it lasts.


I can claim no gardening credit for this tree – it was here when we moved in ten years ago. I am told they are difficult to establish and fussy in their needs but this one seems to be happy with benign neglect. Long may it last.
Do you have a favourite insect-friendly garden plant/tree?

Listen

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child in tree

 

“As a child, one has that magical capacity to move among the many eras of the earth; to see the land as an animal does; to experience the sky from the perspective of a flower or a bee; to feel the earth quiver and breathe beneath us; to know a hundred different smells of mud and listen unself-consciously to the soughing of the trees.”

Valerie Andrews, A Passion for this Earth

Adding a bokeh background

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Hoverfly in flight

I was pleased the other day to capture this little hoverfly in mid hover with the light captured in its wings.  However, the original shot wasn’t quite as nice.

The background is my patio.  It is smooth and doesn’t distract the eye away from the subject but it is not very pretty.  A lovely smooth green would have been ideal but the hoverfly ignored my polite request that it hover over the lawn.  So I decided to improve the shot with a little photoshop magic.

Homemade texture

I have a growing collection of what I call “garden bokeh” images.  They are easy to make. Just find a pretty flower bed and some dappled light and, using manual focus, twiddle the focus ring until you get something you like.  Then snap.  (I like the soft circles that a wide aperture brings – the above is f3.2 – but if you want harder shapes, go for a narrower aperture.)  After a bit of experimenting, I decided on this pink, white and green shot for my new background.  Then it was an easy matter of copying and pasting the bokeh image onto my original.  I usually experiment with various blend modes.  Depending on the look you are after, you are likely to end up using soft light, overlay, hard light, multiply or screen.  The last two have quite a defined impact: multiply will apply the shadows in the new layer whereas screen will apply the highlights.  The other three overlay all tones but with varying intensity.  In this case, hard light worked best.  If the bokeh had been more contrasty, a softer overlay would probably have been better. Then a small amount of black brushing where the new layer was slightly obscuring the hoverfly and, hey presto!

It’s really no different from using a texture, except the over-layer doesn’t actually have any texture, just soft bubbles of colour.

Is it cheating?  Not at all, in my opinion.  Both images were taken by me and it is no different from double exposing film or choosing a complementary background in a studio.  What do you think?