The Ultimate "Bug Hunter"

I frequently go into my gardens "bug hunting" with my camera. I have a lot of fun and have loved learning about the various bugs I get photos of. I have a friend that helps me out if I get stuck. Because of her identification help over the last several years, that need for identification help happens less and less often. She still looks at almost all, and comments on many, of my garden photos that I post on a private platform.

Today, I came across a yellow garden spider. It's been a couple years since I've had a good one for photographs. Spiders are the ultimate bug hunter. Patient like the orb weavers, or stalking like the jumping spiders, I really like them and work to get my grandkids to like them instead of fear them. After showing the grandkids the actual spider and web, I also brought them to the computer monitor so they could see the spider up close. I hope over time, they'll learn to not fear bugs (except for mosquitoes, they suck).

Here are a couple photos of the Yellow Garden Spider, and two photos of "bugs" it may have been hoping to catch.



Yellow Garden Spider

Yellow Garden Spider

Wasp - Cicada Killer?

Skipper

Islands in the Sky

A photo I especially liked from the DLSR part of my The Sand Project



Islands in the Sky

Butterflies Are Free to Fly

Butterflies are one of my favorite bug "subjects". A few days back I was trying to get good photos of a Black Swallowtail, and especially trying to get it with a Yellow Swallowtail that it was sometimes hanging out with. I managed a couple decent shots of the Yellow, and none worth showing here of the Black. For one of the photos I tried to take of the two together, I was a hair too slow on the shutter, and the Yellow was flying away.



Taking a Sip

Profile, Environmental Portrait of a Butterfly at Work

And Off It Goes

The Sand Project, Part 2 - DSLR

The second half of The Sand Project
I spent a week at the beach recently and decided to do a "project" that would be naturally limited.
Images of the beach sand.

The project was limited by:
Time, I was only at the beach a week
Tide times, so the sun would be low enough to get decent shadows and contrast
People/crowds, I didn't want contend with too many people or footprints in my photos

I took two walks with my iPhone, and two walks with my "real" camera (A Canon EOS 6D Mk1 for those who might care).

Here are a half-dozen of the "real" camera images.


A Walk on the Beach

The Rapids

Sunrise

Calm

The Wilds

The Keys

Here By The Sea And Sand ...

Nothing ever goes as planned¹

During one of my walks working on my Sand Project I happened to see an interesting shorebird that I hadn't noticed before. My camera wasn't setup for bird photography and I didn't think to just snap a photo anyway. Instead, I figured I would just walk again later with a camera/lens combination suitable for birds and maybe I'd get a lot of gulls, terns etc. and of course some of this particular group of birds (Royal Terns btw).

So I mounted my 70-200 with a 2x extender and took another walk. As it would happen, I saw very few interesting birds, but I had a lot of fun with some high contrast scenes.


Pier

Shore

Recede

Shimmer

Watching

"Bug Hunting"

I try to make it a habit to go out into the garden occasionally with my camera setup to get pretty close (usually a 70-200mm w/25mm extension tube) When the summer flowers are in full bloom is an opportune time. The echinacea, daisy, black-eyed Susan and mint are all especially attractive to "bugs". Late morning and late afternoon seem to be the best times. I've been a little slack this year, but managed to take time out of my day to do some "hunting" yesterday.



Bumble Bee on Top of the Cone

A Particularly Popular Cone

Bug Sex at the End of the Earth

Bumble Bee in a Rose of Sharon

Zoom in - Bumble Bee in a Rose of Sharon Like a Pig in ...

My Model - The Green Heron

Every time I go to North Myrtle Beach I make a couple visits to The Heritage Shores Nature Preserve.
Almost every visit is rewarded by a few nice bird photos. This year was no exception. The Green Heron below sat and "modelled" for me for 15 minutes before I moved on in search of other "models."



Green Heron Facing into the Sunrise

Green Heron "I'll Stand Up Taller"

Green Heron "How's This Side Look?"

Green Heron "Let Me Look Off Into the Distance"

Green Heron "What's That?"

Green Heron "I See You!"

Green Heron "Is That Something to Eat?"

The Sand Project, Part 1 - iPhone

I spent a week at the beach recently and decided to do a "project" that would be naturally limited.
Images of the beach sand.

The project was limited by:
Time, I was only at the beach a week
Tide times, so the sun would be low enough to get decent shadows and contrast
People/crowds, I didn't want contend with too many people or footprints in my photos

I took two walks with my iPhone, and two walks with my "real" camera (A Canon EOS 6D Mk1 for those who might care).

Here are a half-dozen of the iPhone images.


Scales

Creature From the Deep

Whale Tail

Tropical Islands

The Tree of Life
>

Reflections

"In Ruins"

A friend of mine wrote a book.
"In Ruins", you can find it here: In Ruins

On my walk today through Valley View I came across these Virginia Creeper vines climbing up the side of an old barn. The scene reminded me of her cover art for her book.

In Ruins

Decisions...

How do you decide? Usually I know. I take the photo knowing. Other times I'm not so sure. And then, sometimes I "know" just to see the shot on the computer screen in Lightromm find out I was wrong.

Is the decision black and white? (figuratively or literally?)


Roses - Color

Rosese - Black & White

Columbines

Columbines are one of my favorite spring flowers. I like their delicate look and the layers of petals.


Columbine

White Columbine

"AI" in Photography

Back after a month's hiatus. It was a very busy month.

AI (Artificial Intelligence) is all the rage right now.
LLM (Large Language Models) such as OpenAI's ChatGPT are in the news, and poised to change the world by writing about anything and everything, responding to our queries etc.
Image making is no different with text->image AI programs such as DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney being used to create unique images.

AI is also playing a larger and larger role in photography, not just in creating images, but in the image processing. Adobe's Photoshop and Lightroom have had AI assisted selections for masking, such as selecting the subject, the sky or an object for a while now. This allows for quicker adjustments to exposure, color etc for specific areas in the photo.

The latest version of Lightroom added AI to noise reduction (under the "Details" section). I thought I'd try it out on a photo I took the other day. It's not a "noisy" photo to begin with, but the "Enhance" option with it's default settings did a nice job on interior parts of the iris.

No Noise Reduction

No Noise Reduction - Magnified View

Noise Reduction "Enhanced"

Noise Reduction "Enhanced" - Magnified View

Size and Space

The International Space Station (ISS) is literally 1000X closer to me than the moon in the following photos (~250 miles vs ~250,000 miles for the moon)

How close, how far, how small, how big is certainly relative

Two photos I took last night, the first has the ISS passing in front of the moon. Do you even see it? It's a bright dot near the far right edge of the moon. In the second photo, the ISS appears as a "smeared" star in the lower right of the photo

ISS Eclipses the Moon

ISS has passed the Moon

Be Still Life

Sometimes life, or certain aspects of life, slow down, almost to the point it's still.

These past couple weeks have been one of those times for me. While certain parts of life continue at a frantic pace, the most important are almost in freeze frame.

Another phone photo taken today

Be Still

Blue

Another phone photo from this afternoon

I like abstracts and photos that feature one color in various shades and brightness. I think of them sort of as _____ (fill in the color) and white.
This is "blue"


Blue