Good stuff - Raynoxes are so underrated. I always recommend them.

I apologise for bucking the trend but for me this forum is more or less the same as it's always been, still pretty darn good?

Sure, the remarketing ads are a little annoying but that's Google at work. You can opt out of that but then they get replaced with even more irrelevant ads .

About personal differences, heck they occur on any forums, it's a bit like the weather, just got to learn to get on with it.

Forums and people come and go - this is as good a forum as any I semi-regularly visit.

Website making is pretty daunting for anyone with no experience so you can give yourself a nice pat on the back, well done!!!

The thing though about websites is that there are generally always improvements that you can make and the work is never really finished.

In fact it's usually the content that's the biggest challenge rather than the nuts and bolts. Well done!!

So True!!!

Fwiw, some of the best shots of Ranmore tend to be in Spring when you can see the rapefields over towards Guildford. Very good for butterfly and general macro as well. I go there quite often when I have a few hrs free at the weekend.

Thank you all for your very nice comments! I hope to make a small gallery out of these jewel wasps "American Jewels". I have a second one which I relaxed last week and pinned last night, hopefully for a shoot over the w/e. But it looks a bit knackered so we'll see how it goes. This photo looks to be my most striking shot to date if Flickr is anything to judge by, so I worked on some PP over the week and put it on my extreme-macro site homepage.

Fwiw, don't buy a Spyder4 Pro. I have a normal win7 PC with decent graphics card and it's caused no end of issues with me crashing and bluescreening.

Yeah, ditto to what McGregNi said. I have about 50 lenses, don't have a filter on any and only clean if they look dirty. I store them in ziplock bags when not using, never had a problem with any.

Nahh, it's very very dead! The shots took about 2 hrs (one every 30s). It was sent over to me by Sam who heads up USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab, so it's really been in the wars so to speak. (caught in a field trap, they do this on an industrial scale in the US to monitor bee populations for agriculture). It was dusty, dehydrated, and covered with fungus and cotton (wrapped in cotton wool on its way over). Then frozen for 2 yrs, relaxed in vinegar, restored in Decon90, cleaned for 10 mins in an ultrasonic cleaner, and then finally had the H2O dispersed using Isopropanol. What I do is quite geeky . In fact the recovery is probably the really interesting part - normally dehydrated eyes are kind of gross but there's stuff you can use to restore them - see http://extreme-macro.co.uk/restoring-insects/

The dark under the eyes, yes! It's where the insect's body backs into itself so no light reached there. ie imagine looking at it from above, think of the nearmost edge of the abdomen onto which the head is attached like a W, so the dark bit is the ^ centre part (used 2 flashes, one each side). Happy with the pic though and thank you for the kind comments, nice to be a bit productive again. Been tinkering with this website far to long, now to make photos again =)

251 stack photo shot with JML 21mm lens. Did well on Flickr!




Jewel Wasp by Johan J.Ingles-Le Nobel, on Flickr