Flowers – Summer Time

This past week I got to experiment quite a bit with the ‘reverse lens technique’ I was talking about in one of my previous posts (see: Life in Macro Mode). For the past two weeks I’d been taking photos of flowers, mostly, but I was slowly getting fed up of that. I wanted to start taking photos of insects, I wanted to go more..hard core. Thing is, though, that by the time I managed to adjust my lens and focus onto an insect, the insect would’ve already moved. How on Earth do people take such good macro shots of insects??

The question still stands, but anyway, I’ll figure it out at some point. One day, as I was sitting in the garden, a fly fell on me, as if some higher power had decided that it was finally time for me to experiment with insects. The initial reaction wasn’t so cool, of course; I shrieked and jumped out of my chair, the fly fell on the floor. It was dead. My ‘photographer’s instinct’ guided me straight to my camera, perfect chance! I then spent an hour or so taking photos of a..fly. As I zoomed in, getting closer and closer, the image in the view finder became more and more horrific. Is this what a fly looks like up close? This thing sits on my food when I’m not looking… I could see every detail, every little hair on its body. Once again, I was not as calm as I sound now, as funny as it seems this was a whole adrenaline pumping experience(!). With time I got used to it and I did manage to get some pretty good shots of it, although I still need to work on my hand’s steadiness; only 1 in 10 of my photos was focused the way I wanted it to be.

The following days I explored the garden, camera in hand, in the hope of finding more insects, preferably dead for the time being, and I did! I found a spider and a wasp beetle, as well as another fly; a bigger one. It takes time to get used to all the details and structures you can see, at least for me, but once you learn how to keep your cool it’s very rewarding in its own way.

Last Tuesday we drove to a part of Tseri with a friend for photo shooting; four-wheel driving for the win! I must say that I was quite impressed by his driving skills. It felt as if we were high up the mountains, away from busy roads (away from any roads, actually) and inhabited areas; I didn’t know that such places existed in Nicosia. We were mostly looking for birds but I’m guessing they were hiding from us. Actually, I think we just needed faster reflexes. It was always one of those moments where by the time we took hold of our camera, the bird would simply disappear. I ended up taking photos of the area we’d gone to instead; a beautiful open space (see photos), which was just as fun. What I felt was really cool was the fact that my friend knew all the names of the different birds we saw and their species, and distinguished between them. This inspired me to create some sort of checklist, or just list, of the ‘creatures’ I take photos of. Each time I take photos of some creature (well, insects in this case) I try to Google it in order to find out its exact (scientific) name and then, if successful, I add it to my list, it’s some sort of a challenge of how many different things I can find, I guess. You’ll see that in some of my captions I’ll be including the scientific names as well. I may sometimes be wrong so feel free to correct me!

Well, I guess that my next ‘real’ challenge will be to manage to take macro shots of insects which are actually alive. Oh, and to make my hand steadier. Enjoy! 🙂