Some summer afternoons you idle away in pleasantly pottering in the garden doing minor tasks and routine chores: washing dogs, planting out seedlings, chasing butterflies with a camera, and when that fails, playing paparazzi with flies.
I say “you”, but maybe probably, it’s just me.
Tomorrow, I’ll try for the beach. But today . . .
Fly on the edge
Flies with orange eyes
With a shiny new computer one of the minor chores this week has been rebuilding my collection of filters and handy-dandy favourite tools. I love Photoshop, but another graphics programme I’ve used for more than 10 years is IrfanView , a deceptively simple image manipulator, useful to quickly resize or rename a folder’s worth of pictures, do quick touchups and cropping on individual pictures, and any number of other essential tasks. It’s entirely free – but worthy of a Paypal donation.
Irfan even lets you run 8bf filters. I’ve been rediscovering some old-favourite pattern-makers, the sort of things I use to make background textures and patterns to incorporate into more elaborate Photohshop projects. The free Mehdi plugins include some lovely effects – today’s images are the result of running some very ordinary pictures (of my first tomatoes of the season, and a fly that happened to land near them) through the Kaleidoscope filter. It’s fun to play on the border between recognisable-but-strange and completely-abstract.
Tomato 1
Tomato 2
Fly
Yawny starting points
Keeping with yesterday’s theme of looking them in their tiny little faces.
iso 200, f2.83, 1/125
I admit, it’s very small wildlife. These were taken in the garden this afternoon, playing with a new macro lens on my nearly new camera. I’m finally getting the whole aperture/depth of field/shutter/iso interactions sorted in my mind, which is just as well since at this scale the tiniest tweak can drastically affect the outcome.
They say to always focus on the eyes
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