Holiday bits
A few random pics from the holiday...
Butterfly World
A couple of weekends ago I took a trip up to Butterfly World near St Albans - a butterfly conservation centre. And it was another clothes-optional thing, which was nice.
They have a number of small gardens, each designed by different people, some of which were rather good, plus a butterfly house and an ant house. The main learning from the day was that I need a new macro lens - the £100 Cosina one I bought 10+ years ago isn't very good. Oh, and that photographing ants is bloody difficult!...
Stars, Butterflies and Black & White
As the weather was nice, I took a half day on Friday and headed down to Dorset to camp for the night - the annual Perseid meteor shower was due to peak on Saturday night but I'd seen that the forecast wasn't great for then so tried to make the most of Friday.
And it was well worth it - the skies were fantastically clear and I had a great view of the stars - and managed to see probably 20 Perseids over the course of a couple of hours until the moon rose just after 1am.
This is the International Space Station
And so is this - would have been a far better picture if I'd taken a bit more time to think about it and compose it properly.
This is the only shot I got that includes a Perseid. I must have taken about 50 photos of the sky but this is the only one that caught something. Not as easy as...
North Wales
We had a few days pootling around bits of North Wales.
We were based in Porthmadog, which turned out to be a really good base for getting around. Home of course to the Ffestiniog railway.
This is the evening sun breaking through the clouds onto the Snowdonia hills behind Porthmadog.
While much of Snowdonia is beautiful, you can't escape the industrial background of some parts. This is in Llanberis, and I think the Dinorwig hydro power station is in that hill.
One of these hills is apparently Snowdon - taken from the road between Beddgelert and Llanberis.
One really annoying part of Snowdonia is the lack of places to stop by the road and take photos of the views. The road down the Llanberis pass has great scenery but only about 2 places to stop.
There was plenty of military jet activity. Unfortunately, by far the best view of a plane was one that appeared out of nowhere and passed very low overhead -...
Llanerchaeron
The final stop on our Welsh trip was to Llanerchaeron, near Aberaeron - a John Nash house with an enormous pair of walled gardens. These were full of more fruit and vegetable plants than you could imagine.
Panasonic FX-37, 26mm equivalent, 1/500 @ f3.5, ISO 100
There is also a working farm, with some particularly inquisitive pigs!
Panasonic FX-37, 26mm equivalent, 1/500 @ f3.5, ISO 100
Some of the plants in the walled garden were covered with more bees than I've ever seen - I assume they've got a hive or two somewhere. There were also plenty of butterflies - I seem to have hardly seen any since I was a child (and that's going back some way now...). I was surprised by just how close I could get to it with the macro turned on on the compact camera.
Panasonic FX-37, 26mm equivalent, 1/500 @ f3.5, ISO 100
Having mentioned on a previous post about the fogged infra-red film at Dyrham...