It's the season for dew drops on spider webs, folks!

There were some gloriously tangled, dew-spangled webs on the sempervivum (houseleek) collection this morning. So out came the K3 + Irix 150mm to catch them while they were still in pristine condition.

Impossible to capture entire webs because of their positions, so had to look at details. Changing aperture/DOF and focus point gave a big variety of shots in a small volume of web. Here are three quite different ones. Interestingly, the dark tips of the sempervivum leaves in the background show up in the dew drops, making them look like frog spawn.

Thought, comments welcome as usual.

1.



2.



3.



Steve

Thanks for that. I was beginning to think that your idea of cheap wasn't the same as mine!

Steve

Lovely picture. Not just a picture of a toadstool, rather it's a window into another world. And you're absolutely right about having to spend a while to get into that toadstool world. It isn't 'grab the moment' photography - except when a bug crawls into the scene, of course.

Your video is very good - wouldn't be out of place on Countryfile or Autumnwatch. And timely, too. I'm about to try to get a few folks together to photograph fungi in a local wood and will point them to your video as showing how it should be done!

Pity your video showed how useful an LED light can be on the woodland floor. And that articulating screen... Resisting the temptation to acquire more gadgets just got more difficult...

Steve

Common enough here, too, and not just for photography...

Why is using a phone second best? If it does the job you want and you're happy with how it does it, then it's best for you and that's what counts. And since most of the photos that are taken are only likely to be viewed on a small screen, there's a lot to be said for using one for processing so you know that the final version will look OK on it - I'm sometimes disappointed with what a photo looks like on the tablet when I know that it looks good on the big, calibrated monitor used for editing.

Nice photos, by the way!

Steve

Mid-morning sun creeping under the roof timbers of a dimly lit room at Valle Crucis abbey. Swallows creep in the same way and leave a lot of mess...
K3 + 16-85mm.

Comments and thoughts welcome as usual.




Steve

If your name was Pandora I'd be worried ...

Steve

Not much happening here - is pointlessness out of fashion now?

Got a bit of pointlessness in the garden. The spineless (pointless?) blackberry is flowering for the second time this year, this time on new growth that shouldn't flower until next year.



Totally pointless, no possibility of producing fruit and too low down for it to contribute aesthetically. It does, however, set a new record for early flowering, beating the pear blossom on Christmas Day 2015. A sign of climate change getting worse??

Anything strange and pointless going on in your garden?

Steve

Thanks folks. I can claim no cedit for either the colour or the bokeh!

Steve

Thanks John.
Glad you like it, that's the shot I set out to take. It took ages to find an angle that picked out a single flower and get the tripod (and my limbs) in the right position.

No. 1 was the best of the attempts to get several flowers in the same shot and looking half decent. No. 3 was an attempt to give the impression that everything in the plane of the screen/paper is oof and the front petals are coming out towards the viewer. Still a work in progress...

Steve

So that's what they look like when not wrapped up in the seed head!

Very good picture. Not exactly nature at it's most beautiful, but who cares. Technically excellent and a fascinating subject.

Steve