“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
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.
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?
I hope you like this image I made this morning of a honey bee on fennel. I only have two fennel plants in my garden but they punch well above their weight when it comes to attracting insects.
A beautiful little spider sits in the middle of its web.
There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
William Wordsworth, ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ (1807)
All of these images were taken in my garden yesterday evening.
In small proportions we just beauties see;
And in short measures, life may perfect be.
Ben Jonson, The Underwood (1640)
This fine fellow is machimus atricapillus, the Robber Fly. He perches waiting for a hapless and punier insect to fly by and then darts out – game over. He is not fussy in his choice of perch, even making use of handy humans, but he does not bite people. Here, he is enjoying a spot of evening sun in my garden.
Evening light by the River Thames.
This bizarre creature is gasteruption jaculator. Whoever named it should be banned forthwith from all future namings. I am grateful to afrenchgarden for the I.D. I was wrongly was calling it a sand digger wasp. I have never seen one in my garden before this year. Yesterday I noticed one feeding on fennel pollen but was unable to get a decent shot before it flew away. So, today, I returned to the fennel plant at the same time of day and, low and behold, there it was. And I was delighted to be able to capture it in flight!
It is an elegant creature with its long spike looking not unlike a cigarette holder from the 1920s (or is that just me?). I am assuming this is the female. Her consort, a much smaller beast without cigarette holder, is below. (It’s a lousy shot, I know, but illustrative.)
For an earlier post on other wasps found in my garden, see here.
This weekend, summer finally arrived in our little corner of the British Isles. And with it came the butterflies. This Comma (polygonia c-album) just loved the verbena bonariensis in my garden.
I played around with the image in Photoshop. Well, why not?
It was a tatty fellow, even for a Comma, with a notch out of its rear right wing, but that didn’t seem too much of a handicap.
The honey bees were enjoying the verbena too. Nice to see some more about today. They have not enjoyed our very wet and cold weather.
How did you enjoy the weekend? I hope yours was as good as mine. 🙂
Focused Moments 