The Four Ages Of Sand

Goodbye Four Ages of Sand...

...and hello Four Ages of Sand.

Recent problems with the 4AoS domain name led me to pondering why I stick with Typepad.

"Fouragesofsand.com" costs £10 a year and the full Typepad account costs....£100 a year.  It's not a lot in the scheme of things, but on top of cost, I've never been happy with the quality of image reproduction on Typepad, and the whole thing is rather old-fashioned in its display of images.  This has become more and more irksome as 4AoS becomes increasingly a photographic blog. 

The solution: give it up! And start another. The Typepad 4AoS will still be here, but will revert to a basic, "view only" platform.  

The new Four Ages of Sand can be found on Blogspot.

It's in the early stages but hopefully you'll like it just as much as 4AoS or even, like me, even more so. It's much easier to view full resolution images, as you simply click on one picture and then click again to scroll through the others in the post. The quality of reproduction is FAR superior to Typepad, and it's free, and I get to keep the 4AoS name, also for free, and even more importantly, for ever. 

Thank you for all your support over the years (8 years exactly) and see you on the other side:

www.fouragesofsand.blogspot.co.uk

 

 

 

I'm in sunny Scotland!

HDR heaven. Click on image for full size and better quality:

The joy of a 2X teleconverter

"Proper" macro is 1:1, which means the size of the subject equals the size of its projection on the camera sensor. In other words, a 1mm bug will produce a 1mm image on the sensor.  To get even more magnification, you need extension tubes or better still a teleconverter, basically a sophisticated 'magnifying glass' which goes between lens and camera. The one I always wanted was the Sigma 2X but it's very pricey at around £250. Joy, I managed to get an old style one, second hand for a snip, only £80, so now I'm shooting 2:1, and what a world it reveals! 

Here's a mint moth. It's tiny; only around a cm:

but look what appears when you get in at 2:1!

 

 

   

Canal Magic in HDR

Ah what fun life is with a wide angle lens and HDR!

HDR calm

Ok, after the initial excitement of making HDR imaging, I'm trying calm it down and actually take good pictures which happen to be HDR but don't scream HDR...

This is St Neots this afternoon.  Click on image for bigger and sharper version:

 

 

It's all about the HDR

Today's best efforts at Paxton Pits

 

Today's HDR: Draycote Water

 

 

Another day, another HDR image

 Well 2 actually. 

 

Taking 4AOS back to its roots

Good one from Alan R:

St James' Church, Little Paxton in HDR

I'm trying to make things look a little more natural now.   

Another HDR

The river near our house. Click on image for full size:

Getting better with HDR

The lake near our house this evening. It's an improvement on yesterday's HDR because I'm now getting to grips with the main settings in the software and also shooting in RAW rather than JPG. 

Please click on image to view full size and sharper.

New direction: Wide angle and HDR

New direction for 4AoS!

 I've been playing around with extreme wide-angle imaging, and today started experimenting with HDR too. High Dynamic Range imaging entails taking several bracketed images (one normal exposure and at least one overexposed and one overexposed image. Basically... er better to read about it here on wiki) Alan's an old hand at it (previous post here) but I've only dabbled up to now. Here's my first serious attempt, taken today on Paxton Pits. 

 

 

Tiger Cranefly - Nephrotoma flavescens

 We saw this bug in the woods 'hopping' vertically on the wet soil. 

 

A search reveals it to be a cranefly (Tiger Cranefly - Nephrotoma flavescens I believe) laying her eggs: 

Crane Flies mate on plants near water or in mid-air over the water, depending on the species. Adult Crane Flies do not eat. They have only one purpose, to mate and lay eggs.

 

Female Crane Flies lay eggs in water or in moist soil near the water. If a Crane Fly lays them in water, she will stick the tip of her abodmen under the surface and the eggs will sink to the bottom. If a Crane Fly lays her eggs in soil, she uses her ovipositor to inject them below the soil surface.

  

Nice example of Pareidolia in a fat-legged beetle

Pareidolia: the imagined perception of a pattern or meaning where it does not actually exist. 

Alien face anyone? 

Actually female fat-legged beetle Oedemera nobilis

Micro Magic Moth

What I love about macro photography is that it reveals a hidden world which is right in front of us. This tiny moth (around a cm long) landed on my chair just now:

 

Quite boring looking, until you get a bright light on it and get close up. Silver and gold right under our noses. Magic!

spider eating lunch...

... which is a wrapped moth.

This is a stack of 6 images, and rather grainy at 1600 ISO