Picspam - the birds, the bees, and RTFM

[ffutures]

Since it was a lovely day I went for a long walk west along the canal (e.g. away from the shops, restaurants, etc.) with my camera. Along the way I made an interesting discovery - I've known today that if I press the macro button it's only a moderately close focus, about a foot or so, not ideal for smaller things. But I discovered today that if I press it twice it goes to an "super macro" setting where it'll focus to 1cm. I've evidently done this in the past without noticing, a couple of pictures I took last week were within a few cm, but now that I know this more macro seems likely. It's undoubtedly in the manual, which I got as a download, but needless to say I never seem to have read it.

To save bandwidth I've either cropped or resampled the pictures, whichever seemed to work best. All are behind cuts:

First, some pictures from a few day ago:

Ladybirds bonking and a caterpillar I saw in bushes by the side of the road:







Next, today's pictures:

Lots of cute baby birds around - these geese and goslings were sitting by the canal foraging in the grass and I suspect hoping I'd give them bread:





Some fungi I saw growing to one side of the canal:



Lots of bees, not surprising give all the flowers that are now opening:





And I saw several of these small snails on leaves and walls - not sure what they are, except they don't appear to be the common Helix aspersa, they're much smaller. They were all immobile, I'd imagine waiting for rain or dew.



Last time I took this route I forgot to post this picture, all that's left of the many thousands of tunnel sections assembled for Crossrail a few miles west of my house. The current state of play is that the western tunnels are completed, there's still some being built in East London but that's being supplied from another site. Next phase is excavating around the tunnels at the stations, finishing construction there, and getting the actual rails etc. installed. Still four years to go but it's looking promising.



later - now posted the version of this photo that wasn't taken with the camera held crooked!



Walked about five miles - not especially fast - and really enjoyed it. Next time I want to try pushing on another mile or two, go past the furthest I've walked so far.

Comments

[eledonecirrhosa.livejournal.com]

Nice macros.

My camera has a decent macro lens. But unfortunately a teeny screen, so you can't really tell if the macro stuff is in focus until you've exported the pics from the camera. So I have to snap several and hope! :-)

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Same here, but the card holds 500+ pictures so I always take multiple shots of anything interesting.