New camera in the woods - bluebells and butterflies

Sorry for the lack of posts - I've been getting to grips with my new camera, a Nikon D5300, and also some new software to process the photos, Adobe Lightroom. Anyway, I'm back now, and here's a selection of photos from the woods...

May is always a good month for butterflies, and now I can capture images of them in even higher resolutions! :-) Here's a Peacock sunning itself:

and also a female Orange Tip, which confusingly does not have orange-tipped wings like the male does...

The Brimstone butterflies are out too, and this one actually sat still for me:

Bees are out too - I think this one is a 'Large Red-tailed Humble Bee', but not too sure on that:

and I've no idea what this one is, as I've not got its whole body visible:

Dragonflies are beginning to appear as well:

But the birds are harder to photograph now, with the leaves hiding them, as with this Great Tit:

As well as the usual photos, I've also been trying some of the special features in my new camera. One of them is selective colouring, where you can pick up to three colours to include, with various parameters, leaving the rest of the picture in greyscale. For example, Bluebells with only the blue showing:

And again, but with blue and green this time:

It worked nicely on this daisy:

and also this Lesser Celandine (?):

I also tried a few using HDR (High Dynamic Range) plus a 'sketch' effect:

Plenty more to come in due course...

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.

More Bluebells in the wood!

We went to the woods again yesterday, and saw that the Bluebells are steadily increasing in numbers.

Experimenting with the camera again here - which do you prefer, background more or less blurred? The one with it less blurred used a smaller aperture (higher F number) and slower shutter speed, giving a greater depth of field so more of the Bluebells are in focus:

The trees have come on a long way in just a week. Here's how the Hornbeam looks now:

And here's some Sweet Chestnut:

Also, here's a coppiced Sweet Chestnut just putting out its first shoots to recover from being cut a few months ago:

The Crab Apple near our camp is starting to flower:

and the Hawthorn is greening up nicely:

This is a tree (Alder, perhaps?) we cut some years ago, but it's been chewed by rabbits. It's still going to have another go at growing though:

Just for comparison, so you can see the increasing greenery, here's a photo from a week ago and one from yesterday:

We also saw our first Orange Tip butterfly yesterday:

Of course, we couldn't visit the wood without doing a job of some sort. This time we took up a trailer load of pallets we'd collected from a local shop, to make a floor for our new firewood store:

Tracy's been busy back at home too, planting out seeds:

and preparing a plot for them to go into later:

That's all for now. Hopefully the next post will have some pics of newborn lambs... more on that later!

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.

Attack of the butterflies!

Yes, really, look - here's one going for another!
OK, maybe they were courting, but there was certainly some chasing going on!
It's a Green Veined White (thanks to Steve Wheatley of Butterfly Conservation for help with the ID).

Anyway, the butterfly I was most pleased to see is not rare, it's just one I've never seen before in the wood: the Painted Lady
These were taken out in the wayleave, where there's the combination of lots of sunlight and also Bluebells. I guess when the Bluebells finish soon there'll be other flowers out for them to feed on. Also out there were several Orange Tips. Again not rare, but very striking:
A quick mention must go to the Speckled Yellow Moth - there's lots of these around in the wayleave, but I like this photo as you can see its eyes clearly, and they look different to normal butterfly eyes I think (click on the picture for a larger version):
In the same patch was a Brimstone - I can get pictures of them now I know where they are feeding!
Further down the wayleave were several Small WhitesThey seemed to prefer the Blue Bugle to the Bluebells:
I like the last one, where you can see its proboscis going into the flower to get some nectar.

Here's a couple of pictures of a Large White. They're not particularly good photos, but I wanted to show the different markings to the Small White. They all look very similar from a distance, but once you know what you're looking for you can tell them apart (we're still learning though...).
And finally, the Speckled Wood, which is enjoying flying around the edges of where we coppiced last winter:
Several types of White are also deep inside the wood now, thanks to our wildlife corridor, as is the Brimstone, Comma and Peacock.

That's all for now, another post tomorrow to finish off...

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.