I said a few days ago that local fauna would start making some appearances: and on a day spent mostly indoors, marking, it was this or ‘dog in pub’. And I’ll see dogs in pubs more often than big, fat bumblebees being somewhat disoriented and disappointed by the fare on offer in our living room. I took the picture, but then I showed it the way out.
I know I’m anthropomorphosising, but please tell me you see this bumblebee’s grumpy little face… long nose, protuberant jaw, etc. It’s like, “I know it was a nice sunny day today, but bloody hell is it early in the year to get up.” However… respect the pollinators, that’s what we have to do….
With due respect to Joe, whose 14th birthday it is today, this had to be today’s shot. Most of all I like the capture of the exquisitely delicate grip it has on the petal. There was just this one, half-hour burst of sunlight today, but it augured well for the rest of spring.
I know this is an essentially crap photo, with the focus all wrong, but it was a dramatic moment, at least at the micro-scale. I was trying to get a photo of this bumblebee as it buzzed around the plants by our front door, when suddenly it blundered into this web down by our old coal cellar, where the cave spiders live. Now I don’t know about you but if something one and a half times my size — and bumblebees, in insect terms, are not small — came leaping out at me with the intention of making me lunch, I think my life would flash before my eyes even if it was just an insect life. Three seconds later the bumblebee escaped, but I bet those were the longest three seconds it had ever known. I managed to get this one shot of the drama.
Tolerable weather today, by recent standards, and I got a Lake District walk in – photos are on my other blog (or will be soon, when I post them). This guy doesn’t get the day off though. He was hard at work as I passed him outside the village of Mungrisdale, Cumbria.
Over the course of this blog I have quite got into taking photos of wildlife: animals and plants make good subjects, they don’t get self-conscious in front of a camera. You can’t persuade them to stay in shot and in focus, but they don’t mind having cameras pointed at them per se.
By the way, I have one more month of this blog to go, at least to get to the full year that I set out to do. However, I am going to continue for a second year and finish, finally, on 25th August 2013.
The weather remains beautiful and springlike. I’d say it has brought out the bumblebees but actually, for some reason this year there has been a real crop of big, fat dozy bumblebees doing the rounds for about two weeks now. This one I trapped in a glass to get it out of the pub, but then couldn’t resist using it as a model for about twenty photos during which it got increasingly pissed off and eventually started zooming up and down the glass so fast I couldn’t photograph it any more, so I let it go.
This shot I love, though, it looks like a little mouse with a single wing. You’re viewing it from behind: the two legs to the right are its rear two legs; its head is facing away from the camera, and its left wing is obscured because it lies along the line where the glass meets the paper. The magazine underneath it gives an interesting background. Yeah, I’m happy with this one. Nice photo to end a good week.
Being 42 