In which I encounter a Privet hawk-moth

I had my moth trap out overnight yesterday.  Not the best conditions, a bit cool, blustery and, judging by the ground, some overnight rain.  Needless to say I ended up with only two moths in the trap, a Shuttle-shaped Dart, and a Heart and Dart.

Shuttle-shaped Dart

Heart and Dart

Neither spectacular and two I'd photographed before.  Another early morning with minimal results.  There's been a few of those recently as the weather's been a tad unkind.

Then yesterday evening I went out to water the plants and sitting on my hosepipe was a Privet Hawk-moth, Sphinx ligustri, a relatively common hawk-moth but one I'd never seen or photographed before.  Watering could wait.

Out came my normal moth photography kit of OM-1, Olympus 60mm macro, and STF-8 twin flash, set to Manual exposure, 1/250 sec, and f8.  The moth was very amenable to being moved around and posed (I use a feather to avoid any chance of accidental damage) and I got a few decent shots with the usual limitations of not quite enough depth of field.

Sphinx ligustri

But the evening sun was shining so I decided to try some hand held focus stacking while I still had an amenable subject.  The intention was to get some shots from different angles and still have most of the subject in focus.  The soft evening light brought out the colour of this beautiful moth and, with the greater light intensity, allowed me to use the twin flash for fill in without the usual problem of not enough power to sustain continuous flashes in a focus stack.  

I think it worked.

The moth was then released unharmed into the shelter of one of my palm trees

 Uploading images to Alamy

I went out to The Garden House on Monday (for reference 11 May 2026) for my usual weekly photo tour and came back with 812 images.  Of those maybe a dozen will end up on Alamy for licencing.  Why only a dozen?  And what do I look for when deciding which of the 812.

Well firstly there are a lot of files that are part of the type of focus stack I've described in a recent post.  This produces 5 ORF files and a in-camera stacked JPG.  After stacking in Photoshop I end up with a single potentially usable file and six files I don't really need. (though I do tend to keep the ORF files).  Not every shot is part of a stack but enough generally are to significantly reduce the images available for selection.  Of my initial 812 shots 600 may be part of stacks which then generates a potential 100 images to select from.  Quite a few less.

So this...

...is distilled down to this:

A rather nice focus stacked shot of Deutzia x elegantissima 'Rosealind'.  Cropped, cleaned up very slightly to remove a few stacking artifacts, it's now one I'd quite happily upload.

Step two is to discard the rubbish.  Failed stacks, accidental shutter presses, shots that include labels (always photograph plant labels even if it's plants you know well) that are no longer needed after the images have been captioned, poor compositions etc etc.  I'm not looking for images to include.  I'm looking for images to exclude.  

For example this shot of Anthriscus sylvestris 'Ravenswing' with it's good separation of the subject from a pleasant, blurred background that still shows some context I uploaded:

Whereas this one, with its dark and messy background I excluded.  Technically it's good enough to pass Alamy QC.  But it's not going to stand out among the other 130 images of the same subject.  Not all attempts work.

Which brings me to step three.  What is already on Alamy, both my own and others images of the same subject?  Is an image worth uploading? Sometimes it's easy to decide.  Is the image of a new to me subject?  If so, take the best shot(s) I can, process well, caption and keyword accurately and upload as long as I consider they meet Alamy's QC standards.  I ignore the other three thousand images of the same subject unless mine really are inferior and will forever be overlooked.  

Then there are the numerous times when I already have multiple images of a subject on Alamy.  I don't want to compete with myself so any new shots have to be superior to what I've already had on sale for a while.  In which case I seriously have to think about discarding some of my old images and replacing them with the new.

Then there's selection step four.  I generate dozens, if not hundreds, of images of The Garden House monthly.  Do I really want to saturate my portfolio with hundreds of images of just one garden.  No.  A reasonable number, taken through the year, chosen for the light and composition, are far more effective than simply uploading everything that's of a decent technical standard.  And that's another set of images excluded.

So, that's how 812 images becomes maybe a dozen uploaded.  Maybe a few more, oft times less.  But I think it gives me a better, more curated portfolio.

The damselflies are out

Well, one damselfly at least.  That's the large red damselfly, Pyrrhosoma nymphula, a western Palearctic species usually the first to emerge in spring in the UK. And once emerged they're interested in two things: feeding and mating.

A quick trip down to the pond at Efford Marsh, one of many local nature reserves in Plymouth, found first a red male that had already taken a bite out of a small green weevil (nettle weevil perhaps?) and was obviously eying it up for another go...

...followed by a mating pair who graduated from the initial joining to the classic damselfly mating wheel.

All shots taken with the OM-1 and 100-400mm MKII, ISO 400 and wide open aperture.  I love the close focusing on the 100-400mm and the ability to smooth out the backgrounds due to the long focal lengths of this super telephoto lens.

I'm looking forward to getting more damsel and dragonfly shots once they start emerging as the weather warms up.  I got a few dragonfly in flight shots last year with the 40-150 f2.8 + 1.4x teleconverter but struggled for range over water.  Hopefully the extra reach will increase my opportunities.