Yellow Stickered

I came home from my dad's last night to find the sky really clear, and the weather still quite warm. I armed myself with my 150-500mm zoom, a 1.4x teleconverter, and my trusty Benbo tripod, and took a few snaps from just outside the front door. I am particularly pleased with this one of the planet Jupiter, showing three of its four moons. From left to right, the picture shows Ganymede, Callisto, Jupiter itself, and Europa. Io, the fourth moon, is behind the main planet. I'm not some sort of psychic when it comes to knowing one moon from another. The good people at www.skyandtelescope.com have a handy little calculator that shows the relative position of the moons at any given time.




17 Day Old, Waning Gibbous Moon
According to my computer, the moon was 403516km from me and my camera. I'd check it myself, but petrol is expensive these days.

At least there was some fungi to photograph!


I couldn't resist this. By getting in very low to the ground, I hope to have given a feeling of space and depth to this micro-landscape.

Our house has a colony of bats in the gable. Tonight, this little one was found newly deceased outside our front door. As you can see, he/she was absolutely infested with red mites, so my dear wife was none too keen on me having it in the house to photograph! One can only marvel at the delicacy of such a tiny animal, about 45mm in length. The foot, shown in the top photograph, was about 5mm across. It is incredible to think that it can sustain the weight of the bat at rest.

Much as having bats can be a nuisance (it is a pain to have your windows soiled with bat urine!), I think they are lovely little creatures, and I really like giving them a home.

A trio of shots taken with my old infra-red converted Canon 350D. The first was taken in Paphos,Cyprus. (What self-respecting geek wouldn't want to take specialisd kit thousands of miles away to carry around in the blazing sun?) The middle one was closer to home at Coity Castle, near Bridgend in Wales. The last of the three shows yours truly, together with my long-suffering wife, Jo, at Zygi in Cyprus.

For me, the joy of infra-red is never really knowing what you are going to end up with. The proportion of "keepers" to rejects is low. Live view gives a good indication, but it is the processing that brings IR shots to life.

I didn't need a TARDIS to be in Monument Valley before Doctor Who. We all know that stetsons are cool now, but I must confess to being bare-headed at the time. It was probably a mistake, because it was a little chilly, to say the least.

The end of a beautiful day out and about in Pembrokeshire, catching the last dying rays of the sun. Bosherston is an absolutely stunning place to take an evening stroll, but the only person there apart from me and my better half was a fellow photographer, working on a book about the fauna of the area. You can certainly see why photographers call this time "the golden hour".

Cool and windy weather is no barrier to photography, even if my choice of shorts and sandals was a bit too adventurous. Jo and I braved our way through an ocean of sheep droppings to the megaliths. It's not the best of places to get a decent shot if you want to include all three stones. From one side, you have to include a house in the background, and the other side gives you a splendid vista of telegraph pole. I wasn't overly thrilled with any of my shots from the session. but I chose this one, taken with a Lensbaby Composer with super wide-angle supplementary lens. I think the distortion adds an air of new-age weirdness to the image.

Cardiff Bay, home to Shirley Bassey and the Torchwood Institute.

Here's the problem. What you find is a geek without a purpose. I love photography, but my only way of getting my stuff seen is through Facebook right now. I don't really fancy Flickr and the like because they have become a mutual admiration fest.

If you like what you see here, you can blame it on my old school-pal, Michael Thomas, who planted the seed of this page in my mind a while back.

I'm not going to promise you high art, but images that are pleasing to me, if only me.

Watch this space!