(S)he came through the bathroom window*

Diaphanous and fluttering in white.  All I did was leave the light on and the bathroom window open.

Swallowtail moth, Ourapteryx sambucaria

Swallowtail moth, Ourapteryx sambucaria

One of the largest UK moths, you'd want it to be an exotic rarity but, apparently, they're quite common on July nights in the UK.  Captured with the aid of my Sigma 180mm macro, flash and softbox - and a good deal of personal contortion as it sat on the ceiling.

*Lennon/MaCartney composed Beatles song but the best version is by Joe Cocker.

Lateral thinking

I've had little time for photography and less for blogging recently but I managed a family day out at a local beauty spot; Bedford bridge on the Horrabridge to Tavistock road.  It was hot, baking hot, and sensible wildlife was taking refuge against the heat or, in the case of the insects I was interested in, zipping around and never settling.  Frustrated, I'd just about given up when I spotted a Golden ringed dragonfly, Cordulegaster boltonii, patrolling a deeply cut small ravine with a tiny stream at the bottom.  I worked my way to the bottom and waited patiently for it to settle.  It did, but always remained tantalisingly out of reach.  I was working with the 600D and 180mm macro mounted on the tripod for additional stability and I couldn't manoeuvre the combination close enough to the couple of places it did settle to get a shot.

Until it settled on the tripod.  And a little lightbulb went off.  It wouldn't settle because there was nowhere to settle.  Off came the camera from the tripod, out went the tripod to the other side of the little stream, down went my backside on the streambank and, with elbows on knees for support I waited for the dragonfly to return.  I wasn't disappointed.  Here's a few of the shots.

Cordulegaster boltonii

Cordulegaster boltonii

Cordulegaster boltonii

Cordulegaster boltonii

They're all natural light with a little bit of fill flash at either 400 or 800 ISO to give a high enough shutter speed to avoid motion blur from hand holding.

Tavy railway bridge panorama

I'm not a practiced shooter of panoramic pictures but some subjects cry out for the ultra wide treatment.  A couple of weeks ago I went to Warleigh Point on the banks of the Tamar near Plymouth.  The aim was to shoot insects in the nature reserve (I did) but I couldn't resist shooting the railway bridge which crosses the Tavy where the Tavy and Tamar join.

Railway bridge over the River Tavy, Devon.  Click to enlarge.

One of the benefits of digital photography is the ability to stitch multiple shots together in software rather than requiring a dedicated panoramic camera such as the Hasselblad XPan back in the days of film.  In this case the bridge, set against a background of the rolling hills of the Tamar valley, needed a stitched panorama to avoid either cropping top and bottom or the inclusion of large amounts of sky or estuary mud if I'd tried to fit the whole width in a single frame.

Out came the tripod, on went the 180mm macro to get the right framing, the camera was set to manual exposure at 1/400 and f9 to avoid variations in brightness across the panorama, and I took 12 shots, tracking from left to right with decent overlap between the shots to make the stitching easier.

Back at my desk I processed the RAW files with identical recipes, batch converted to JPEGs and stitched the 12 files using Canon Photostitch (free with Canon DSLRs).  Sounds easy.  It's not.  You can't rely on the autostitching so each merge seam has to be merged using multiple points to get the best placement.  12 shots is eleven merge seams.  Get one out and it throws off your other merges.  And to check it's necessary to save the merge, check the resulting JPEG - and start again if a merge hasn't worked correctly.  I spent a little over an hour getting it right to produce a seamless panorama.  It may be easier in more advanced programs but I work with what I've got.

Even that wasn't the end of the process.  The resulting panorama needed straightening tp produce the correct alignment.  I use GIMP as my photo editor and this has a tool to set the correct angle.  In the case the alignment was easy.  I simply aligned the middle four spans at the point they met the river.  Just like using a spirit level.  A final crop and save produced a 25875 x 2947 px image, reduced by Blogger to 1600 x 182 for inclusion on this post.

I think it works well - and the original preserves all the detail inherent in a high resolution shot.  Detail like this of one of the supports.  Click for the 100% crop.

100% crop from Tavy railway bridge panorama

Now to find someone who can print it.  At ~300dpi it should work out to 90 x 10in / 225 x 25cm, even larger if I take the dpi down to 250 or even 200.  On second thoughts I'm not sure I've got that much wall space - especially if I repeat the process with the tide in.

Update:

I've added a 4000px wide image to Flickr.  Click here to view.  Right click on the Flickr image and choose original from the size options to see the larger image.