Smoke

Today the light was strange. There was a high cloud layer with occasional thin sunshine that was orange. Everything was the normal colour except where the sunlight fell. It turned out that a huge cloud of smoke from the Australian wildfires was passing over. This shot of the sun is straight from the camera. Taken at 3.37pm.

For those who can stomach it the extra shot is of a hapless bluebottle in the clutches of a crevice jumping spider. The spider is mostly hidden in its crack, but you can see some of its legs holding the fly. The fly’s abdomen has caved in from the spider’s activity.