kontrawize

Geese and Swans

It was a sunny day in London today, perhaps one of the last of the year, so I had my camera with me as I was walking through Surrey Quays in the Docklands area of London.  Here are some photos of some geese and swans that I saw along the way.

I have a different digital SLR now, a Fujifilm S3 Pro (I previously was using an S1 Pro).  I see that a lot of people are using Adobe LightRoom to process their photos, but I prefer to use software with a Linux version where possible.  I used Bibble 4 Pro to process the RAW photos and produce the basic JPEGs, and The Gimp to add the drop shadows.  Bibble 4 is good.  The GUI is not as slick as some packages, but I found it easier and quicker that Paint Shop Pro, which I've otherwise been using (under Windows XP).

Bees in Trees

Here it is, the long awaited sequel to my post on "Ants on Plants".

It's a week later, and the ants have gone. Bees, wasps, and even flies are in their place. OK, so they are still in the same plant as last time, not really a tree, but it would have been a shame not to use this title, right?

Big Wasp #1 (well, bigger than the small wasp)

Bumblebee #1

Big Wasp #2

To see the rest of this series, visit my "Bees on Trees" page at Fotki.

Ants on Plants

I was looking at a plant in our backyard, which has just started going into its full summer bloom:

I can't tell you what type of plant this is (I'm not a botanist, nor even much of a gardener), but what I did notice is that the open flowers (and not the unopen flowers) had ants crawling over them, which is something I hadn't ever noticed on a plant before.

Having trouble spotting the ant?  Here's a zoomed-in version to help:

For the photographically curious, I took these photos using a Fuji S1 Pro digital SLR that I bought recently (second-hand) on eBay.  The body and a Sigma 17-35mm  f2.8-4 lens were £200 together, which was not a bad deal.  The S1 Pro is basically a Nikon F60 body with a Fuji sensor and electronics.  This allows me to use the lenses from my Nikon F601 film SLR (which I bought in 1993).  I took the photos here with the 35-70mm zoom that came with my F601.

The S1 Pro has a 3 Mpixel diagonal array sensor that produces 6 Mpixel images in TIFF or JPEG format (no RAW).  The photos here are unprocessed; I simply converted the TIFFs to JPEGs using Corel Paintshop Pro, and added a drop shadow.

Blue Dragonflies in Bulgaria, part 2

Following my post with my photos of blue dragonflies in Bulgaria, I was looking for other dragonfly photos on Google Images, and found one that looked very much like the photos I took. Turns out it was on a page for a dragonfly tour to Bulgaria in 2007. I hadn't realised they ran such tours, but there you go. Keep it in mind if you are at a loose end for something to fill your time in July 2007 ...

Blue Dragonflies in Bulgaria

I've recently returned from 2 weeks holiday with my family on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria. While I was there, we went camping by a creek near a village not far from the coast. I didn't get the best sleep in the tent (not being used to the sound of jackals strolling past in the night; we found their paw prints on the banks of the creek where we pitched our tent), but I did get some photos.

The indigenous dragonflies are a beautiful iridescent blue/green, so I chased them around waiting for them to land. There was no shortage of them, as the creek is very near a place that is breeding them now to counteract a decline in their natural numbers. Here are my photos:

For good measure, a few more photos taken in the same area: