Or… love of the forests at night. Last evening was a rewarding session at a new location (‘somewhere in MacRitchie’), new night macro set-up (X-T1 with 55-200 + Raynox + that tiny EF-X8 flashgun and a mounted torch), newish shooting companions (almost but not quite the ‘Magnificent Seven’). I usually stick to a few usual places for night macro; exploration of new localities are rare but welcomed. Each patch, I find, has its own charms and hosts its own community of little forest denizens that may be less commonly sighted elsewhere – even if the ‘elsewhere’ is simply another track…
Life’s like that. We pick up and move on, as we always do. It’s back into the forests after the trauma of the previous few months, after what is possibly the greatest loss I’ll ever come to experience in my life. Mantis (Amantis sp.)with cricket prey Giant forest ant (Camponotus gigas) major
Domestic house spider (Tegenaria domestica)
Venus Drive 14 August 2013, 2.3km Who’d have guessed that the X100S isn’t just a brilliant streeting camera, but does decent nature macro photography as well! First field test went better than expected: slapped on a Raynox DCR-250 close-up lens and used my Nikon SB-800 flashgun with a flimsy DIY diffuser softbox (it fell into a pool of murk when I was shooting the frogs), synced with a SC-29 remote cord. Everything is manual: exposure, flash settings, flash handling sans extension brackets. The only thing that’s stopping me from using manual focusing is that I’ve run of out free hands.…