Lizard

I was up early today. When I looked out of the window, it looked damp with a heavy dew, so I decided to hit the common early in the hope of a dewy spider web shot, but alas, the moisture had already burned off. The only way I am going to be able to show you the marvelous construction is to take my own dew in a bottle. I don't think that this is a problem as long as I say so, I am not out to fool anybody here.

While I was at the St Andrews web I decided to shoot a few boring images as a backup, seeing as the light and wind were favorable. As I was shooting, the shit hit the fan or rather a bee hit the web, what an explosion of activity. The bee was wrapped, injected and left to hang in about twenty seconds flat. I managed to get three shots off before it was all over, but as expected with the flurry of legs, not a sharp image amongst them, still one of them was worth blipping, but I am not so sure that you are ready for such graphic blips while eating your breakfast.

I shot a few images of a spiny orange lynx spider that has been blipped a couple of times before. I then found a new spider. I couldn't work out what I was looking at while shooting, but back at the lab it all became clear. However this small spindly spider, chewing on a small fly was beyond the macro capabilities of my camera, so it goes in my collection folder.

I collected images of a seven spot brown butterfly and the double headed butterfly and some good shots of a large hopper sitting on a banana leaf, just begging to be blipped. By now I had more than enough material for today's blip so after only fifteen minutes I decided to call it a day, but then the stripe caught my eye.

It was a tiny lizard, about three inches plus tail, basking in the sun. I started shooting as I moved in and noticed that he kept closing his eyes, like he had not noticed me. So I advanced only while his eyes were closed and managed to get to minimum distance of eight inches. I was excited because this was a new species of lizard for my collection, but back at the lab I was disappointed to find that I had not nailed the focus as well as I should have, in fact the same statement applied to all of today's shots, more care required tomorrow.

Still, I decided to go for the cropped shot, even though I had the whole body image. The splash of lime green is quite impressive, if I was a lad, this would now reside in a jar.

Dave