When the light's gone...

  Today it's been a pretty bad day when it comes to weather. Cold, I had to wear long johns. Wet and rainy, bad for the camera equipment. What ever, I felt I had to get out and just to motivate my self a little bit more I asked a friend to join me. When we started it was hardly raining, just a little bit of cold drizzle, but when we were almost there were I thought we would do a few images, it was already raining quite a bit. That's life and bad weather, even if it's raining cats and dogs, shouldn't be a hindrance for photography. There we were walking in the rainy forest with pretty bad light. So what can you do? Grab your speed light and use it. I didn't hope to find any animals but found. One poor Fire Salamander was crawling among the fallen leaves. Camera on the tripod and a little off-camera flash from the right side of the animal. It's almost like sun would be shining out side...

  
  Wet condition is good for fungi and I managed to make a couple of images of Puffball mushrooms. Again I chose to give the mushrooms some extra light therapy. In the first image the I used a longer shutter speed to give the backdrop some light. The second one has a shorter shutter speed and thus the background is a bit darker, this way you can see why these mushrooms are called Puffballs. The "smoke" coming out from the fungi is its spores, emitted because of an impact from a water droplet. Even if we witnessed this happening because of raindrops, in this image it is faked, my friend took some water from the nearby stream and you know...  

  

Beneath the rocks

  Flipping stones is an interesting way to spend your time. You never know what you'll find. So many times there's nothing. Then you can find ants, wolf spiders and other common invertebrates. Lizards, snakes and frogs tend to hide under rocks and debris. And of course every now and then there is a vole or mouse hiding there. One interesting critter that can possibly hide under stones is centipede. There's lots of different kind of centipedes, but one of the more nasty ones is the Megarian Banded Centipede. Found two of them on Monday. The first one escaped, fast as they are. The second one stayed, so I managed to make one, not so good, but a picture anyway...

   

A short trip to gods bridge in vratsa

   In hopes of finding at least one last snake for this year, a caspian whip snake, if possible, we drove all the way to the town of Vratsa. Lots of voles, but no snakes. The place were we went is called gods bridge, a natural phenomenon of lime stone. The lighting conditions were not the best as you can suppose in a cave, were the shadows mix with sunlight. A big test for the dynamic range of any camera. I tried to solve the problem with my SB-600 strobe, but you know, a tiny small flash in a big dark cave like formation... dark. So, anyway here's a couple of images from this interesting place...

     

Time for sleep

  There's always those moments when you really get sad. One of those moments for me was this week when my wife found a hound dog in the rain. It was most likely hit by a car, who knows when, and then left to die. There she was, couldn't move, couldn't do nothing. Some nice person, who still had some humanity, had brought her some bread. Thanks to that person. We carried this poor creature in to our outbuilding, dried her with a towel and gave her water. The next day we took her to the vet, hoping for the best, but expecting the worst. Some people seem to think that animals are toys, as long as they like them and they are of any use for them it's ok, but when they are done, get sick, can't work they'll  ditch'em... that's what pretty much happened with this poor creature, something that we understood very well from the visit to the vet and a short conversation in there . No other options, but a needle and everlasting sleep.

   

Cat with a flash

  Thought that I should start to use my old faithful flashgun more and more. So today I was trying to use off camera flash in various situations. Mostly this happened with people, but as I love to shoot our pets, of course one of our cats ended up as guinea pig...

 Our youngest one got a bit tired, so it was pretty easy to try some flash techniques on him while he was resting.

  And one more image. A beautiful woman with a kitten, a nice conclusion for the day.     

Zinnia getting visitors

  One of my favorite flowers is Zinnia. Not only that it is interesting looking and beautiful, but it's a tempting flower for different pollinators. For a couple of days I've been trying to photograph a couple of those nectar hungry invertebrates. For the purpose I chose just one flower, the tallest one...

High noon and both the flower and the background are nicely lit 

A hummingbird hawk-moth visiting the flower. The background  is in the shadow of a nearby building

  Some kind of a hover fly spotted the flower and came for a sip

Not all of the insects are of flying kind. A couple of shield bugs enjoying the fall sun

   Last but not least a small white butterfly taking advantage of the juice of the zinnia flower.