Blue and white

It was Wednesday morning.  I'd taken the dogs for their first walk of the day and noticed some small tortoiseshell caterpillars feeding on nettles.  A good subject to add to the portfolio so, dogs well exercised, fed and happy to sleep the morning away, I went out again.  The small tortoiseshell butterfly caterpillars were one objective but I also wanted to photograph the southern marsh orchids that have gradually been colonising a local field that is being managed as a flowering meadow by Plymouth City Council.

Of course you get sidetracked.  I'd got my shots of the caterpillars and was walking down to the orchids when I saw a white bluebell in the hedgerow.  Alongside was the normal blue version.  An opportunity not to be missed.  Here's the landscape view.

Blue and white forms of the English bluebell, Hyacinthoides non-scripta

I'm talking about the English bluebell.  Hyacinthoides non-scriptus.  Honey scented, endemic to North West Europe, with 60% of the population in England and Wales, white sports occur occasionally in nature.  They've been collected and brought into cultivation (not a good idea unless you have a large garden - sheets of bluebells gives a good indication of their invasive tendencies) but it's still nice to see a wild white flower.  Especially when contrasted with the typical blue.  Here's the portrait view.

Blue and white forms of the English bluebell, Hyacinthoides non-scripta

I remember as a child in the 50's going to a local wood in Grimsby and picking bluebells with my parents.  They weren't as common in the drier East as they are in the wetter South West of England.  Here they're everywhere.  In woods, hedgerows, fields, clifftops - anywhere the black seed can germinate and produce the white bulbs that store energy for their late spring flowering.

Did I get the shots I wanted of the small tortoiseshell caterpillars and the orchids?  Yes.  Here's a sample.

Clustered caterpillars of the small tortoiseshell butterfly, Aglais urticae, feeding on nettle

The young caterpillars are communal, clustering together after emerging from the web at the base of the shot as a protection against predators.  For some reason the adults have been in decline in recent years - I rarely saw any - but the last couple of years have shown a local expansion.  May it continue.

As for the orchids it's been a pleasure to watch them multiply over the last 4-5 years as a patch of a field has been left unmown till late summer.  There are hundreds in there now.

Southern marsh orchid, Dactylorhizza praetermissa

Southern marsh orchid, Dactylorhizza praetermissa

Close up of the flowers of the Southern marsh orchid, Dactylorhizza praetermissa

 As always, click to embiggen the photos.

Floating

Sometimes a shot jumps out and demands to be taken.

I was enjoying a walk round a local garden (not, alas, my own) this afternoon.  They have a stream fed pond, part of which is planted up with water hawthorn, Aponogeton distachyos.  The water was glass clear, conditions were almost windless and the bright May sunlight was at a perfect angle to evenly illuminate the shallow water right down to the bottom without inducing surface glare.

Which enabled me to get the following shot:

Aponogeton distachyos showing floating flowers and foliage and the stems rooted in the bottom mud

The leaves are floating flat on the water surface.  The white flowers are just protruding above  the surface.  At first glance there is no difference between the air and the water.  The picture looks as though it is portrait of a ground dwelling plant.  Only after examination do you notice there is a barely perceptible ripple, just enough to provide the subtlest dimpling around the emergent leaves and flowers and gently distorting the underwater anchoring stems.

Normally a polarising filter is needed to cut reflections and glare and enable a limited view through the air-water interface.  I didn't need one today.  Conditions were perfect to capture an almost textbook illustration showing the whole of an aquatic plant.

Technical details are embedded in the EXIF data.  Click to embiggen the shot.

My Alamy experience - part the first

It was mid January 2014.  For reasons I can't go into in this post I needed validation that my photography was capable of reaching the quality standards required for commercial licensing.  I'd sold a fair few in the past - but only as part of a word and picture package, not on a stand alone basis.  Which got me thinking about the stock photography market.  And, specifically, the UK based macrostock agency, Alamy.

I photograph flowers.  Oh, and insects, local nature, gardens, a bit of landscape and a few other bits and pieces.  So do many other photographers.  With an abundance of images in those categories many stock agencies are very selective about accepting new work.  Alamy have an interesting business model.  They don't judge content and will accept any photographs - providing they meet their clearly defined but stringent Quality Control (QC) standards.

So, rather than just continuing to build an image bank to illustrate future blogposts, books and articles, I decided to see if my increasing collection of images could meet the technical requirements for submission to Alamy and add another outlet for my imagery.  It's been a learning experience.

Your first submission is four images.  No more, no less.  All four are judged and a QC failure for any of them damns your submission.  Which is why the advice on forums and other areas is always to submit four technically perfect but otherwise boring photos.  These were mine:

Apple Blossom

Episyrphus balteatus feeding on Ceratostigma willmottianum

Green form female of Common blue damselfly, Enallagma cyathigerum

Hemerocallis 'Children's Festival'

Two insect macros and two garden plants?  Risky, very risky if one listens to forum advice.  But look at that in another way.  They're representative of the work I'm going to be submitting both now and in the future.  Better to find out they're not good enough at the outset rather than later down the line.

Submitted on January 13th, I got the email notifying me that all four had passed QC on the morning of the 14th.  I was in.

There are a lot of horror stories about Alamy QC on the net.  Failures for tiny technical errors - a missed dust spot, the odd vagrant bit of chromatic aberration, the dreaded soft or lacking definition - and, of course, acceptable and unacceptable cameras.  Their clearly stated policy to reject all images in all batches awaiting QC if any examined image fails.  Pushing to the back of the QC queue should an image fail - with a possible 28 working day wait for notification.

Perfectly reasonable requirements.

Try working to the 6 sigma QC standards commonplace in UK manufacturing industry.  3.4 failures per million to pass - and, of course, perfection is what you always work towards.  And go out of business if you can't meet those standards.  Compared to that stringency Alamy QC requirements are pretty lax.  And completely understandable.  Alamy are putting your pictures in front of a discerning audience.  It does their and your reputation no good if technically substandard work is presented to buyers.  So every image needs careful examination at 100%, pixel by pixel.  Dust bunnies need cloning out.  Chromatic aberration needs dealing with - I use LightRoom for post processing and it's a simple process.  Images should be unsharpened - and that can produce some very soft looking photos.  The point of focus should be spot on the appropriate part of the main subject - eyes for my insects, stamens for the flowers.  The list goes on - but it's all necessary.

And if in doubt, throw it out.  I've discarded many images that, on careful inspection, simply weren't good enough for critical inspection at 100%.  11 uploads and 188 images on sale later I haven't had a QC failure.  But if I do it will be my fault.  My personal QC won't have been good enough.

I'll cover the joys of image management and keywording  - and the terrors of the wait for confirmation that your latest upload batch has passed QC - in the second of what is likely to be an occasional series.