Hoverflies and bike ride

The weather over the last few days has been wonderful.

The other afternoon I sat in the garden for ages watching hoverflies and bees visiting the Michaelmas daisies and Cystus (I think the pink flowers are Cystus....) I set up the camera on the tripod, focused on a flower head and waited for something to land and then fired the remote control to take images every second.

This one was taken using the rapid fire burst option on the camera

Yesterday I went on a bike ride to Glasson Dock - what with it having been dry for a while, together with the wonderful blue skies I elected to go via the canal and come back the way I usually take via the river.

The path along the canal is not a designated cycle path and at times it felt a bit precarious. A narrow way has been worn by walkers, but trying to keep the bike wheels on it felt a bit like tightrope cycling.

The sun was glorious, though blinding at times, I was glad there were few people around, otherwise a dip in the canal would have been likely.

Trying to catch the sunbeams

It was a great day for reflections.

(For the record: total distance 14.14 miles; average speed 6.2 mph (lots of photography stops and bike pushing in the really dodgy bits; maximum speed 12.8 mph)

Colouring in

We were at The Pencil Museum in Keswick a couple of weeks ago. It's a place I have been wanting to go to for ages. The reality didn't quite match the expectation in that it was very small and if there hadn't have been a video of the pencil making process the trip round it would have been very short.

I spent quite a time in the shop and came away with a colouring in book as well as a "Daily Sketch journal". While I don't do sketching, I thought it would be a good way of  putting down daily ideas for photo projects and also to record hints and help I glean along the way.

As for the colouring in .. I haven't done any colouring in since being a child. I am enjoying the process of the colouring in together with using it as a means of experimenting with time lapse.  In addition, it is making me very aware of the benefits of Slowing Down, (I realise this does just pertain to keeping within the lines!)

This is the result of  first attempts in both processes. The video merges 4 smaller ones and really could do with slowing down. It isn't obvious but each of the videos was taken with different time lapse intervals.

This second video combines time lapse of the colouring in together with some animation I have done using Photoshop. I have just discovered Photoshop's animation workspace which makes things a lot easier than the long winded process I had been using.

Insects

Hoverflies on teasel,.

Time lapse, 20 second intervals over 2 hours

Greenbottle on yellow flower at our local garden centre

Once more into the blogosphere

It's not that I haven't been doing stuff, honest! I have just been remiss in writing posts about my activities.

Recently it has been time lapse stuff. Two books I have recently read (What a plant knows by Daniel Chamovitz and Sting in the tale by Dave Goulson) have inspired ideas.

Growth of plant tendrils round a stick is called thigmotropism, this can be seen in the time lapse sequence I took of one of the cucumber plants in the conservatory. Pictures were taken every two minutes for 8.5 hours from 8am. The curling and movement of the tendrils can be seen.

What can also be seen is the movement of the leaves, apparently this occurs in many species, Darwin made a study of it. So, there are plenty of opportunities to look at what happens with other plants.

I captured another type of leaf movement with the Oxalis plant on the kitchen window sill. A sleepless night and a 4 o'clock foray for a cup of tea and I noticed the plants leaves were all folded up. The camera was set up and left until I had a late and leisurely breakfast. A picture was taken every 5 minutes for 3 hours.

In the garden we have various plants attracting bees. In an attempt to see whether it was possible to identify what types of bumble bee were coming to the garden I set up the camera next to the thistle plant. 

The result has inspired lots of questions:

• how many visits per hour?
• what types of bumblebee?
• does type and number of bee vary with different times of the day?
• are all the flowers on the plant visited equally?
• what about other species of flowers?

Time for more

Yet again there has been a long gap since my last posting.

I have been playing around trying to learn some more Photoshopping techniques, and the following are the results of some of my playing around with time.

Work in progress, cycling with camera

I've recently got a new bike. Being a fair weather cyclist, it has been frustrating not to get out on it very much. The last one fine day we had when I did go out, hay-makers joined forces with all the other pollen producers along my route and I came back with a week's worth of hay fever.

So today, I tried again along the same route. It was all a bit of an experiment trying out time lapse with my camera attached to the pannier rack.

Clearly there is more than a little fine tuning necessary, but basically, it seems to work. I have already worked out how to get the camera set up less precariously and at a higher level.

As for hay making, there was none, instead in the fields there were the sounds of disgruntled shorn sheep, no doubt complaining at the shock to the system of being deprived of all their weatherproofing. The unshorn lambs now looked bigger than their mothers.

Destination was Glasson Dock and a welcome cup of tea and then to the smokehouse for some smoked mackerel for tonight's tea.

Plant movement

The cucumber plant we have just bought provided inspiration yesterday.

A bit of time lapse photography.