Pollen Collection

This is another shot from Roberts Bank from quite a while back. The yellow flowers in this shot are just a few of a very large colony. As it turns out they drop pollen like crazy which I discovered after getting this shot - I'd pushed my way into the midst of them and once back on the path I found myself covered in pollen stains which could not be brushed off. Worth it though, I think.

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Can you spot the Red Winged Blackbirds?

Thought I'd post this one just for something a little different - more for what you can't see in the picture, even though they're there.

There was a very large flock (several hundred probably) of red winged blackbirds out at Roberts Bank the afternoon that I took this.
They were dividing their time between the lighter coloured taller field on the right, and the marsh/reeds behind me on the other side of the pathway (which is on the dike) that I was standing on when I took this shot.

What's neat is there were probably 150-200 birds in the field at the time I took this shot but you can't see any of them as they're down in the grass hiding from predators and having a snack on all the seeds. Whenever a group of people walked along the path, specially if they had a dog, the birds would flee the grass en-masse - over top of the 'dangerous' people - in favour of the reeds. A few minutes later they would start to return to the grass, 5-20 at a time, until the next 'threat' walked by.

I actually got a couple of shots of the sky thick with the exodus to the reeds, but I wasn't very happy with the shots for technical reasons so thought I'd post this one instead.

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The Approach

I spent some time one afternoon with my macro lens working on just one large colony of wild pea. Over the course of things I was able to distinguish at last 6 different types of bee/wasp working the blossoms, and another two varieties on immediately adjacent plants. I didn't manage to get satisfactory pictures of all of them, though I did try. After a while I gave up trying to get them all - some you just couldn't get close to - and instead spent some time trying to capture the ones I could get close to in flight.

It's not as easy as you might think... Having said that, this shot isn't bad, though a little faster shutter would have been nice so as to capture more of the wings.

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Unreal Blue

Sometime back I started experimenting with LAB colour in photoshop, and I'm starting to regret it, I think. You can take an average image and play with it until it comes out just the way you want it and looks awesome... until it gets converted back to sRGB and the colours get shifted way out of whack and you then spend more hours trying to make it look like it did in LAB colour.

I spent a lot of time fiddling with this image, trying to take it from mediocrity and make it into a possibility I'd imagined when I shot it.

I have not been completely successful.

It hints at what I'd imagined, but falls short in ways that I can't explain. Of course, if I could, then I'd probably know how to fix it and I wouldn't be writing this...

That said, I wish I'd taken the time to climb down the rocks a bit to get closer to the water level, so that the horizon was better placed in frame, even though the jet trail was drifting rapidly to the right and within about 30 seconds had moved out of frame.

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