A few days ago I was walking in the woods a few miles from where I live and noticed a sign about how a local conservation group had dredged the pond in the woods to encourage more wildlife to the area. When I got there I discovered a small pond about 10m across, and it stunk. There was no obvious inlet or outlet so the water was just sitting there looking lifeless.
However, from the corner of my eye I noticed something zoom around the edge of the pond. It was a light blue dragonfly flying around the perimeter of the pond and then disappearing. I watched for a while and then noticed a brown dragonfly hovering and dipping it's abdomen into the water - clearly a female ovipositing her eggs. I then realised that the two must have just mated and whilst the female was depositing the eggs the male was 'keeping guard'.
I walked slowly around the pond and then spotted the blue dragonfly on the branch of a small bush on the waters edge - that's where it had been disappearing to.
On my return home I identified the dragonflies as Broad Bodied Chasers (Libellula depressa) - very common in the UK but it was the first time I'd seen one.
Photography using the exposure of light-sensitive materials began around the start of the 19th century.
Exposure times were by necessity long as the materials used were not as sensitive to light as more modern films. This meant that if a photographer was photographing something other than an inanimate object then the subject had to remain still for the whole period of the exposure which may last hours in the early days.
Try sitting perfectly still for 30 seconds. Yep, nose is already itching. So you can imagine how demanding it would have been to sit for hours. To overcome this problem 'posing stands' were used to support the poor subject and enable them to remain relatively still.
As time went on the technology improved and the exposure time was reduced to minutes (and eventually seconds).
Adults may be happy to sit still to have their photos taken but small children were another matter. They like to fidget and move around so you've got no chance of the little darlings sitting still to have their portraits taken. However, the Victorians came up with a simple fix - hide their mother under a sheet behind them to hold them still. The sheet could be made to look like the back of a chair and no-one would notice. Today these are generally known as Hidden Mother photographs.
And not just for babies:
Once you have some new technology some bright spark will find an alternative use for it. The Victorians loved their seances but with so many fake ghosts making an appearance at them some hard evidence for the supernatural was required. By taking multiple exposures on one photographic plate a 'ghost' could be seen to be present. Photoshop for the 1800's.
The ghosts may not have been real dead people but the Victorians had no qualms about photographing real corpses. Poor families could not afford a portrait painter to immortalise their families but some could afford a photographer. If, however, there hadn't been time to have their photograph taken whilst they were still alive their families would have them photographed post-mortem. Memento-mori were quite literally images of dead relatives.
Memento-mori have made a come-back recently but in a much more real form. Some people are now choosing to see their loved one not in a coffin at their funeral but preserved and presented as close to what they were in life.
Racking your brain as to where the title of this post comes from...?
So my little blog has being going for a whole year. It seems to have come round pretty quick. I haven't posted nearly as much as I would have liked to have done but spare time is not something I have a lot of.
Over the last year I've taken loads of photos that were going to be the basis of new blog posts but I just never had the time to finish them, so for this celebratory (but lazy) post here are a selection from the posts that never were.
A big thank you to kensosha.blogspot for posting a link on Twitter to my last post on Selective Mutism; visitors went from 0 to nearly 40 visits (40 visits is huge for my blog).
I'm looking forward to the next year and hopefully my work-in-progress posts will appear soon.
A while ago I found this article about Matt Molloy's time stacks. He takes time-lapse images and merges them in Photoshop to produce stunning images like this one:
I thought I'd have a go so I headed for the hills and set up the camera on the tripod and took one picture every minute. The one thing you MUST do if you try this is to load in a new set of batteries before you start as your camera is going to be on for quite a while. I had planned to run the sequence for an hour (60 pics) but the batteries failed after 40 minutes. If I'd taken the camera off of the tripod to replace the batteries I would not have been able to perfectly align the camera again, but 40 pics were enough for a test run.
Once I got home I fired up Photoshop and used the following process:
Once I got home I fired up Photoshop and used the following process:
1. Drag all the images into Photoshop in the correct order. Press Enter after each image is dragged in to Place it. 2. Right-click the bottom layer (the background layer) and select Layer from background then click OK. 3. Go back to the top layer and set the layer blending mode to Lighten and set the opacity to 70%. 4. Right-click the top layer and select Copy layer style. 5. Select the next layer down, hold down shift then select the bottom layer to select all the other layers. 6. With all the other layers still selected, right-click and select Paste Layer Style. 7. Save the file as a .PSD (this will take a while and will produce a huge file). 8. When the .PSD has saved save it again but as a .JPG. 9. You now have an image that you can tweek.
I adjusted the levels and contrast and used a gradient mask to balance the levels across the image.
Here's my effort:
Clearly not as spectacular as Matt's. However, this was good practice as I realised that there's more to it than taken a load of pictures and dropping them into Photoshop. The clouds in my set were moving from left to right and the images were taken in bright daylight. Matt creates his images with the clouds coming towards him to produce a dramatic perspective. Also, most of his images are of sunsets which gives a dramatic contrast of light and dark. And there is the fact that Matt uses up to 1000 images where as I used just 40.
Since I created my image I've found a YouTube tutorial produced by Matt:
He uses a slightly different technique to mine but it's essentially the same.
You can see more of Matt Molloys time stacks on his Flickr:
If you don't have Photoshop and can't afford to 'rent' it from Adobe's cloud (you can't buy a version which you install on your PC/Mac anymore - you have to run it from the Adobe cloud), Adobe are currently offering a free download of Photoshop CS2 and loads of other previous versions of their software from:
Recently I've been on a few of trips in deepest, darkest Somerset.
A couple of weeks ago I was on the Somerset Levels, the first time I'd visited since the horrendous flooding. It was good to see (at least in the part that I visited) that the area is nearly back to normal.
There were plenty of damselflies around but I didn't spot any dragonflies. I'm no damselfly expert and identifying them can be a bit of a minefield as there is a certain amount of variability in the markings of the blue species but I think the following show either Azure damselflies (Coenagrion puella) or Variable Damselflies (Coenagrion pulchellum) and a Large red damselfly (Pyrrhosoma nymphula):
My next trip was to a secret location 'somewhere in Somerset'. I'd heard of an unspoiled meadow that was supposedly full of orchids and after some investigation found someone who knew where it was and was willing to tell me. So many sites are damaged that I won't reveal the location but here's what I found:
Green winged orchids (Orchis morio)
Green winged orchid (pink variety)
Water forget-me-not (Myosotis scorpioides)
Red clover (Trifolium pratense)
Greater spearwort (Ranunculus lingua)
Common fumitory (Fumaria officinalis)
More Green winged orchids
My last trip was to Broomfield Hill near Bridgwater to see this year's spectacular display of bluebells:
English or Common bluebell (Hyacinthoides non-scripta)
&
Red campion (Silene dioica)
If I've mis-identified anything here please comment and I'll amend the page.
