An unlikely bit of 'nature study' for this time of year!

I noticed some tiny specks on the edge of my bird table the other day and wondered if it was a clutch of insect eggs
The piece of timber here is 2inches x 1 inch, to give an idea of the scale



When I fetched the camera with an Industar 61/LZ macro lens I could see that they were not insect eggs but some sort of fungus






I ended up changing to my MacroTakumar, which is 1:1 to see quite what I had found



This is one of the tiniest puff ball fungi (maybe it's an earth ball?) imaginable! You can see where the tips are beginning to split on some of them
and the internal structure of the one that has burst entirely, shedding spores everywhere. The patterns on their skins are lovely too.

Proof was found on the other side of the bird table where there was a colony that was further advanced, with most of the fruiting bodies busily erupting.


This is a more normal sized one, for comparison, about 3inches across (and with a different skin pattern entirely).



Have a wonderful 2018 photographing all the things that float your boat !

I too love well presented graffiti art. It isn't easy to do and a lot of effort often goes into the pre-production with carefully scaled drawings of the site and the intended result. These show off the results very well.

And try setting the program dial to M. You then acquire the correct shutter speed by pressing the green button after having set your desired aperture.

My first was an Exa IIb - one of those on which the entire back came off to change films. It came with a 50mm Meyer Optik Domiplan and a Zeiss 100mm. Both lenses saw long service on its successor, an Exakta RTL1000 until some slob of a burglar stole the whole lot. That caused the eventual purchase of an ME Super and a P30 and then a K5 but my earlier experience of 'old' glass remained and is responsible for the present marriage of old and new which I would recommend everyone to try - you will be surprised at the results.

John made a good point about a great membership. Its what makes this forum so good to belong to so Happy Christmas everyone and to John and Sue in particular

I have it running now and I had no trouble following the instructions for the Macro installation. It's going to be a monster learning curve though.

I just did so too. When I came to install it, it asked for my e-mail and product key (as one expects) and no matter what one does to the relevant boxes none of them will accept any form of input and the cursor just sits there blinking. I'll try again tomorrow!

This one demands a much bigger display area. I accept the reasons for leaving things smaller but ........

The spiderweb works very well

I get my Pentax stuff (K5 and latterly K3-11) from Carmarthen Camera Centre link who not only beat the other guys on price but give a first class service too.
I just had a look - there's pages of Pentax gear.