This is blackberry time

[Geoff F]

A Red Admiral feeding on ripe blackberries. I struggled to find an acceptable angle among the bramble foliage and eventually had to remove the tripod so I could get myself into a better hand held position. This is the only shot which came anywhere close to being acceptable. 1/160 F11 Iso 400. 7D with Sigma 180 macro lens.

Another difficult scene in poor light while sheltering under a tree from a shower. Scleroderma areolatum - Earthball fungus. The top has split to allow the ripe spores to 'escape'



1/8 F11 Iso 400

And one more image which also caused me a lot of shooting problems. A Blue Shieldbug - Zicrona caerula



I had to push the Iso to 1000 to get an acceptable shutter speed of 1/80 with F11. A merge of two different exposure shots.

[Ziggy]

Nice series. The blackberry makes for an interesting perch.

[Shadowman]

Nice series.

[JohnRostron]

Nice set. The Red Admirals are still about here, but the Blackberries are declining in number (barely enogh for a couple of breakfasts per week).

John

[bnnrcn]

Nice series Geoff .You seem to have managed the exposure well in the last image although bugs which have such reflective shells are difficult to shoot without blown highlights

[JBW]

the equipment does make a difference. ISO 1000 on my camera and there would have been no shot to merge.

[IzzieK]

Good series Geoff. My favourite is the fungus. The last one is nice too with the cool colour combination.

[Geoff F]

Thanks for the comments.

I don't like going above Iso 800 for this sort of shot, Brian. In fact I try to keep to 400 as the maximum but sometimes when flash isn't giving the required answers it is a case of trying something else and pushing the boundries as far as possible or just giving up. In most cases I do get a lot of total failures when shooting like this and there is always quite a bit of editing to bring out some acceptable brightness levels while reducing the low light noise problem.

Fungi are normally static so I can usually get away with a low shutter speed when using a tripod and cable shutter release; sometimes with mirror lock up as well. Quite often with fungi I need a bit of negative exposure compensation to get the brightness levels correct. I often mess around like that with aperture priority setting to find out which settings are working best then switch to totally manual adjustments.

[Wavelength]

Very nice set of images