Back to Nature
June wasn’t exactly ideal for insect photography up here in Saddleworth. The temperatures were high, but so were the winds and finding a calm day was a real struggle. So, I decided to return to photographing small birds in the garden for a couple of days.
I started to feed the birds a few years ago. At first, the food wasn’t taken…for two reasons, I think. First, the feeders were not sited in the right place and second, the birds didn’t much like the food mix I was offering. I now feed almost entirely sunflower hearts, which I buy in bulk at half the price of the local supermarket and garden centre, though they are eating half a kilogram of it per day at the moment, so it’s getting more expensive. It’s worth it though, as I now have quite a colony of different birds living nearby and visiting the feeders regularly. There have been lots of baby birds this year too. Here are just a few of the pictures from the last two days.
Back in June, on a morning visit to Reddish Vale near Stockport, a friend and I came across a small colony of banded demoiselles. It was a good chance to try out in-camera focus-stacking, and it actually worked out pretty well, as one female kept returning to the same area, so I managed about ten stacks of her over half an hour or so. It’s always worth sticking around, as damselflies often return to a favourite perch every few minutes. I hand held the camera as she was determined not to come close enough for me to use the monopod for support. Hence I had to put the ISO up higher than I would ideally have liked.
Canon’s in-camera stacking is brilliant. Although it only produces a .jpg combined image, the quality of the stacking allows the picture to be used, in many cases, without further editing. If there are visible artefacts, it is occasionally preferable to stack selected frames in Photoshop. Below are a mixture of in-camera and Photoshop stacked images.
Finally, a few more insects from a local meadow.
