What is this blog about?

When I retired in 2006 I had it in mind to try some photography. In 2007 I bought a small sensor bridge camera and a close-up lens and found that I liked taking photographs of invertebrates, mostly insects and spiders, and botanical subjects, mainly flowers. Most of this was done in our garden, which has quite a lot of botanical subjects as my wife is a keen gardener. The garden also has some invertebrates of course, although unfortunately there are far fewer now than there were a decade ago. Since 2011 I have made occasional visits to several nature reserves managed by the Avon Wildlife Trust in the Gordano Valley, mostly photographing invertebrates, although there too the number and variety of invertebrates has declined.

I have tried various cameras, lenses and other equipment over the years along with a number of PC applications for editing photos. I have tried some other subject matter, for example common birds in flight and skyscapes/sunsets, but invertebrate and botanical subjects have remained dominant. On and off I have posted in several on line forums, sometimes highly active, sometimes inactive for long periods.

I created this blog in 2012 but after only five posts gave it up. I have decided to give it another go, to use it as somewhere I can quietly reflect on my photographic journey, away from the rough and tumble of forum activity.

To start the ball rolling here are two images - a fly and a flower in our garden. I envisage writing in future posts about how I go about creating images like these, the hardware, software and techniques, and how I have arrived at using those particular devices, applications and methods.

Click on an image to see a larger version

A fly on a Fatsia bush in our garden last November.

A Hebe in our garden on Christmas Eve last year

There are a lot more photos in the following posts, but here are three other places I have put my stuff.

• Flickr. For over a decade I have used this as a dumping ground for images that I might want to link to on line. My photostream is not a good place to start. It has tens of thousands of images, including lots of technical/comparison images that look very similar to one another and are very boring, and also some other people's images (marked as "NOT MY IMAGE") which, with their permission, I have reworked as part of on line discussions. A better place to start is with my collections, each of which contains a number of albums.
  
• You Tube. I have made some videos, listed here. They are about particular topics that I happened to be working on at the time. My delivery is very slow (some of my, not very many! viewers have said they prefer that), so you might want to use You Tube's facility to speed up a video you are watching.
  
• Adobe Portfolio. I have had a first go at creating a portfolio here, but I will revisit it and might rework it completely when I have finished this sequence of posts about my photographic journey.