Garden Buddliea Gallery

        Living in Marston Moretaine means that I am close to both lakes and open countryside, and in different weather conditions there is never a shortage of varied subject material for photography. On this occasion I only opened my back door and my Buddliea was hosting different butterfly species about their business of pollinating, whilst savouring its abundant and welcoming pollen.
        The preceding days had been dull and uninviting for them, but on this day, the wind had subsided, the sun shone, and I was feeling the need to be outside as duller weather was forecast, so it was not a difficult decision to forego exercising my car, and to simply take advantage of the visiting butterflies and exercise my small LUMIX, without any need of even a monopod for support. This camera does have its quirks, and I do need to keep using it frequently to establish the best way to master it, as my memory, or rather, lack of it, necessitates that I keep up my familiarity with its controls, as they are not as easy to master as my Canon bodies and lenses.
        It is interesting to note that fellow photographer, Adam, had arrived at a similar conclusion as myself but two years or so earlier than me, and in his case, the choice was Sony equipment. In my case I was at the NEC for a photographic show, and I was meeting up with a fellow photographer with whom I had once worked alongside, who had brought a friend with him who suggested I visit the LUMIX stand as he felt the FZ10002 might well be worth taking a good look at, as he had recently bought one, and was highly impressed. Playing with it on the exhibition stand, and looking at the impressive results, on an impulse, together with this endorsement from a user, I decided to buy one, there and then, along with a spare battery and charger as it seemed like a reasonable risk. I have to say it has lived up to, and exceeded expectations, and although it is still not as easy for me to exercise total control over it compared to my Canon bodies, it is no toy! The pictures in this gallery I could not have managed with my long zoom on the Canon camera without recourse to a tripod, and even then I could not have moved around to capture the shots I managed with the LUMIX! Thank you Panasonic.

I Revisit a Park Just North of the A421

          I headed across the A421 to visit the woods beyond. Once parked, I took the soft case from my LUMIX FZ10002, leaving it behind in the car’s boot, and hung the camera around my neck. On this occasion I am travelling light, very light! Not even my monopod. Locking up the car, I take to the long dark tunnel of trees into the open air beyond, occasionally stopping to capture images along the way that caught my eye.
          Currently, the weather seems somewhat unsettled, and slightly less clearly season defined, but I did find metallic green flies, at least three species of butterflies, Red Admiral, Meadow Brown, and some others that I could not immediately identify. Variegated leaf colouring and backlit leaves also attracted my interest, as did a fair number of small, or simply young hoverflies. Beyond the woods, in the open area of the park, the wind had picked up, and despite taking several of the paths in hope of further interest, I was disappointed, as nothing much caught my eye, and therefore my camera — the rest of my walk yielded only fair weather clouds, the green winding paths and one long, lightly leaved and bowing branch framing the curving metalled path.
          I had gained the exercise, enjoyed the fresh air, and was impressed yet again by just how versatile this small camera is and fully justifies my decision to purchase it — it does not replace my more expensive kit, but when travelling light, fully earns its place amongst my heavier and pricier cameras.

Biddenham - A Long Riverbank Walk

I set off to Biddenham and the River Great Ouse to stroll along the banks to capture some of the native life to be found close by. I took a shot of the Information board, to make it easy for me to reference on the blog. I have been here before, but on this occasion I was here to explore the numerous paths leading off the main one, to reach close to the water’s edge where the subjects of my photography are to be found in fair numbers.

Fortunately, right at the beginning of the walk, there were good views of the bridge from the bank close by the Park entrance, with the river flowing fast over the shallows on the left. I took to the path that runs close to the bank, and investigated what shots could be taken along the bank side path, before finding the real images I sought; which were of the wildlife, such as butterflies, damselflies, and dragonflies and, views of the enclosing landscape of the park.

It was during the time down by the river bank, that I spotted interesting patterns in the water, so naturally they appear in the subsequent gallery of images in my blog. The River Great Ouse meanders in numerous loops in Bedfordshire, and in this area the river is often shrouded by woodland, which offers me good chances to photograph the birds, animals, insects, associated trees, vegetation, and flowers.

On this outing, there were numerous butterflies and damselflies; and the list of those, that I later managed to get shots of were Red Admiral, Brown Hawker, Ruddy Darter, Comma, and Meadow Brown butterflies, and Damselflies. One such, I had never seen before, the Emerald Damselfly. Altogether, I had a very enjoyable and productive afternoon.Later, after working through the editing I found myself with one image over a round number to fill four pages in the gallery to be uploaded to the server, so one more look through the images to decide which one is for the chop! Lastly, which image or images will head up the Blog entry, when it is ready to go online.

Life in my Marston Moretaine Garden

It would seem my Buddliea took longer to arrive this year than in earlier seasons, and perhaps, it knew this was a strong likelihood, so delayed producing its bloom, because within days of flowering and attracting pollinators; bees and butterflies, the British Weather gave us an extended period of high winds, and to a lesser degree, rain.

I took advantage of the arrival of mainly a handful of butterflies, and to a lesser degree bees, to take my camera out with the Canon 70-200mm lens and the Sigma 2x Extender, and did my best to capture their efforts to feed on the rich nectar they sought. There were periods during which I had to patiently await a lull in the gusty wind that was battering my plum tree and Buddliea ferociously – I had already lost two dozen plums before they had ripened, and this number rose still higher, despite my earlier efforts to try to lessen the amount of movement the branches were accorded, by tying them to a large clay pottery flower pot.

The three Butterfly species I see most are the Small Tortoiseshell, Red Admiral and Cabbage White.The butterfly’s response to the wind was to lay their wings as flat as possible against the leaves to weather the gusts, then in the few lulls get back to  delving into the florets. From my point of view, I was trying to get the most possible use of the loaned 2x Converter to help me decide whether to make the purchase. I was certainly finding that overall the issue that gave me greatest concern was how efficient autofocus would be when using the Converter.

The heartening result overall, was with the EOS R, although I would still often have to obtain initial focus manually, once I was close, the camera took over and locked on with ease. By the end of the afternoon I was convinced, and contacted Sigma to send me the invoice, as there was no need for me to return it!

Although at first sight, there may seem numerous duplicates within the gallery, there are subtle differences, and I was trying to see just how well the focus was maintained, and considering the amount of movement I was involved in trying to keep track, the camera was definitely less troubled, and I was able to recompose the images easily in post processing, especially when I was particularly pleased with some of the shapes formed by the leaves that allowed me to create good compositions, What that meant was that invariably the overall crop whilst taking was not tight, despite the greater enlargement, the quality of the mirrorless body’s files was still excellent, which has been a real benefit.

Readers of this blog will have noted how I have had to adapt my way of shooting, especially when panning, to accommodate to some of the different characteristics involved between my dSLR bodies such as the 7D MkII and 5D MkIII. Canon remain tight-lipped over my suggestions, with this issue, but admit I am not alone in suggesting a modification to the way in which bursts are handled by this camera to lessen the impact of the lag between the image in the viewfinder when a panning sequence is shot. The expensive but obvious alteration would be to have two parallel processors; one for Viewing, one for Capture, my suggestion however was to mitigate the effect by discontinuous sampling of the signal reaching the Viewfinder, as in my humble opinion this could be achieved by a separate setting for panning operations. Time will tell. The technique involved would not be too dissimilar from image stabilisation, and could be linked to the difference in inertia involved in the camera’s motion.

Unexpected Gallery of Garden Interest

 had a need to show the effect of a narrow Depth of Field to illustrate how to throw an image of a flower away from its background and suppress detail beyond with a pleasant soft blurring, popularised by the term ‘Bokeh’.

According to the Law of Unexpected Consequences, which I might have  expected given the season and the warm weather after some rain, I became distracted by the hum of bumble bees pollinating some of the flowers, and the very typical flight pattern of the humble hoverfly – a particular favourite of mine. Instead of two minutes outside  before returning to process the aforementioned couple of shots, I spent my lunch half hour following the hoverflies and a couple of large green flies, possibly green bottle flies, two of these spent a short while just looking at each other, before flying off.

 The Buddliea is just coming out which should mean a splash of colour from visiting butterflies, but for now, I just spotted three; a Cabbage White, Comma and Red Admiral. None stayed long, obviously there are more developed Buddliea elsewhere! Last week whilst I was mowing the lawn which was covered in clover flowers, the bees were making the most of it before I finished clearing it to reveal the grass, and it was interesting to note the density of bees increasing as their food source was diminishing, and I was careful not to injure them, which meant I was forever stopping and starting to give them the best chance to survive.

I hope that last night’s rain and today’s warm sun puts some green back into the khaki  lawn that has been prevalent for the last month or so. I cannot complain about the opportunity to get another gallery of images to the blog, so the time taken was not wasted.

Brief Visit to Tring Reservoirs

I had not travelled to Tring Reservoirs for some time, so on a whim I phoned the Water Bailliff to find out if I was able to get my car parked nearby, but he was in a meeting and could not speak, so would speak to me in the afternoon; the answer suggested I might still be lucky, so I travelled down later on the offchance and was lucky, and since I found the gate unlocked, I phoned him, and learned he was down at the lake himself, so asked was it OK;  he told me fine, and I went along to meet him. We chatted about his wife who has been unlucky with her health. He broke off suddenly when he spotted a cormorant.

They are having a lot of trouble with cormorants that are very damaging to the lake’s fish, and Bob is constantly using a cap gun to scare them off, but it seems it is a battle that the cormorants are winning as they are increasingly taking no notice of his efforts to drive them away. Unlike herons that eat smaller fish, the cormorants go for the trout and often just wound them, resulting in many of them dying from their wounds, which leaves the anglers very angry, especially since restocking is so expensive. I left him to his task and set off with my camera and monopod, to Marsworth.

The water level was very low and the few birds that were there were gathered en masse on the shore close by the stream that fills Startops lake, there were several cygnet families, Canada geese, black-headed gulls, greylags and coots all together in the shallow water or the exposed foreshore. I spotted a Mallard drake making a beeline for two others, and it seemed he was exhorting them to join him and bring the duck along too, which I found intriguing as at first I had thought he was being aggressive. Awhile later I spotted first a small dusty-shaded butterfly I took to be a Speckled Wood, and also a Red Admiral, which surprised me so late in the season. In my walk along the canal towpath I met several couples out with their dogs and in the course of conversation learned of a pair of herons between the locks, but at this time I did not see them.

Later still whilst I was down at the water’s edge looking ahead expectantly waiting for sight of a kingfisher, I glanced to my right and there was a silhouette that looked very like a kingfisher in the dark dead branches completely still – putting the camera to my eye I realised my good fortune and slowly I focussed on him, and opened up two stops and increased the ISO and just hoped as I watched that it might be enough to allow me to brighten it later in Lightroom. I took several shots as he swung his head around every so often sometimes with his eye showing, and when I ‘chimped’ I thought they were going to severely lack colour as he was in such deep shade. Much later on the computer in Lightroom I was really amazed at how much detail I had succeeded in getting from the gloom in which they were shot.

Having been rewarded by the kingfisher shots I walked further along the canal, but on the outward journey failed to spot the youngster on the far side, however on my return, there it was perched on one leg absolutely motionless. I got some shots in profile by waiting for him to be distracted by some of the strollers, I thanked them and we chatted as I headed back to the car. We parted company at the junction of the towpath and the two lakes, and I met up once again with Bob and another angler and was treated to a snack of pork pie and a cup of tea, before heading back to Marston Moretaine.

Three Species of Butterfly Grace my Buddliea

On the second day of more frequent butterfly visitation, there are now three varieties flocking to the rapidly fading Buddliea in the back garden – there is a fourth, but it is the Cabbage White and it it is very elusive; rarely stopping anywhere for more than a nanosecond, and fortunately definitely less attractive than the three more colourful – the Painted Lady, Tortoiseshell and Red Admiral, that were present this morning around breakfast time.

Nothing more to say than the wind meant I had to work harder and waste more shots! But they were very welcome visitors, I did make another discovery, the two plums which I had since forgotten, were no more, one had dropped and both had largely been consumed, which was sad, I should have picked them both when I first spotted them!