Beautiful Bugs

Last Saturday 1000's of these dragonflies flew past the house. I have never seen anything quite like it. I tried to take some shots of them in the air to no avail, but then noticed that some were landing in my field. A quick change of lens and I managed to get some quite lovely photos. Unfortunately we were on the way out to a birthday party for one of the girlies friends, so I didn't have quite as much time as I would have liked.

They were green


Brown


and they were red

*

Beautiful Bugs

Ugly Bug

Look what I found! It's a Praying Mantis and was just asking to have it's photo taken. It proved a very amiable model, and let me take loads of photos.

I used my Canon 100mm f/2.8, which hasn't had an airing for ages. I must start doing a few more macro shots again. Unfortunately I don't suppose I will be able to find a willing model like this one every day! *

Ugly Bug

Landscapes

I seem to have a problem with landscape photography, that I don't really know how to sort out. My images always seem kind of flat and uninteresting. I know that we are all our own best critics, and when you know that there is a fault or something wrong with your picture, your eyes are just drawn straight to it. I have been trying just this past week though, and am quite pleased with the sunset picture above. This is obviously helped by the canal (luckily full at the time) leading through to the background, and the reflection of the setting sun.


Here, I am rather liking the fact that I managed to get some feeling of volume to those lovely fluffy white clouds, and the road travelling into the distance helps with acheiving some sort of perspective or depth. The fact that I took it whilst travelling along the motorway must also give me some brownie ponts too no?

I'm fairly pleased with this one too, the view from my front terrace, although I obviously need an artistic director to do things like remove the plastic table - hahaha *

Landscapes