Lockdown over , Cornwall Holiday July 2020 pt 1

 Our Cornwall holiday is a go ,the Coronavirus lockdown measures have been lifted for campsites from July 4th  .Kay at Crossroads campsite where we normally stay ,at Cubert near Holywell bay has confirmed opening  so we are on our way , leaving about 2.30 ish to hopefully escape all the heavy traffic that will also be heading to the south west today. 

The M6, M5 and A30 were mostly clear , but all the services along the way were rammed with motorhomes and caravans so we had the best decision leaving very early.    As it turned out ,less than an hour after we joined the A30 it became gridlocked by all the vans we had seen parked up om the way!

All set up , its a bit damp and misty but forecast is looking ok for the next few weeks.

A first walk down to Holywell beach , its about 20 minutes walk across the dunes from the campsite.

Yes the Holywell Horrors, as they are referred to when down here seem to know the way down to the beach, and its steep  1

The sea is rough, with strong wind the waves are crashing onto the beach, so keeping the dogs well safe.

                                The next morning time to let the dogs have a good splash!

Beautifull blue sky this morning , the big waves have left deep patterns in the sand , this will be a good feature for a sunset shoot one evening.

The dogs are loving this beach ,  its not the best for them when tide is high as it gets deep quite suddenly , but like this its great and quite shallow. 

                                                                Hahaha    what a face!

I have come down to the beach this evening with Ozzy to shoot some wave images, its very windy with a big surf crashing along the beach and headland.  Chester cant come as the moment you stop walking he starts barking loudly  and doesn't stop!

 There are some huge waves tonight , using the 5dsr and 100-400 L to take these images, Ozzy is sitting near me watching, such a good boy .

 This wave almost reached to top of cliffs !

                                                             A crop from the above image. 

Nice wave tube.

                                Back up top now watching the waves , a great evening .

Creating a Panoramic Drone Image.

Over the last couple of years i have been increasingly shooting aerial images with the aim to produce panorama and Vertorama images .

Here is an example of how i go about editing a panorama image. A Vertorama (vertical panorama is almost the same method)   

When shooting with the drone , in my case the DJI phantom 4 pro , it has a panorama shooting mode which takes 9 images automatically, three rows of three.   This is my preferred way of shooting but it is hit and miss sometimes when shooting from the sea looking back at the coastline, as the bottom often gets cut off and you get too much sky in place.   So in this example I have shot frames manually, four rows of four making sure to have enough sky and foreground sea in all the frames .

Opening up my RAW images in Lightroom i have selected the 16 frames , then press Ctrl M to open them in the panorama screen.

I have unchecked all the boxes on the right hand side of the screen, I don't want any cropping to be done and Auto settings produces fake looking colours most of the time which take a lot more effort to correct afterwards.  I always try all three projection settings on each image to see the differences , Spherical most often is best for standard panoramas, but Vertoramas often need the other two methods to produce the best looking image without distortion.  

This is the result of the merge , the sky is missing top right but that is easily corrected later in photoshop using the original corner image.  Leaving uncropped also leaves me the option to have as much sea in the foreground to suit the composition , auto crop would cut off too much.  Click Merge and is creates a merged DNG image in the Lightroom catalogue.

Open the merged file and in full screen I have cropped to my final composition , there is a small amount of sea to clone in bottom right corner along with the sky to fill in .

Here I have done some basic adjustments before finally cropping to bring the flat looking image to resemble the actual scene I photographed with soft early morning light, trying to produce as natural looking image as possible.

The image is now exported into Photoshop , the spot healing brush has cloned the missing part of the bottom right corner easily.  Now I have opened the original top right corner frame with the missing sky ,( i have no idea why it missed it out in the panoramic merge) as a layer on top of the image , Using Edit/Transform/distort  the image is stretched so the sky reach's the top of the image . Now clicking on the Square white layer mask icon at the bottom of layers pallete to create a mask and using a soft brush at 50% opacity , the two images are blended together to produce a seamless result.  Altering brush opacity as required.

The sky has blended nicely and pressing  "Layer / new adjustment /levels - to add a "Levels" adjustment on this layer ,using the middle slider to brighten and match the rest of the sky it is looking good.  A  " Levels" adjustment has also lightened the sea and with a "Curves" layer to add shadow/highlights the image is nearly finished .

After a few more minor adjustments here is the finished image, I actually moved the sky layer to the left to merge in better and added a slight increase to the colours with a Vibrance layer to bring out the beautiful sea colour (it is more subtle than a saturation adjustment) Shadows/midtones have been increased slightly also.    Then "layer/merge visible" is pressed to flatten the layers into a single image which can be saved in the required format , jpg , tiff ect.   

Preying Mantis June

Starting in early June the Wide Armed mantis is growing and is quite white in coloration now .

5dsr  mpe 65 at x4 magnification.

The two flower mantids are now sub adult, meaning they will become adult at the next skin moult and get their wings.  I still cant work out if they are both male or not.


You can see the wing buds now, quite thick and colour showing through. So it will not be long before getting wings .

                           both 5dsr  mpe 65 at x1 life size , they are a very small species.

             The Dead leaf if still growing very slowly , he is sub adult now.  and has fabulous eyes !

                                                   Multi frame focus stack  5dsr  mpe 65

                The Giant Rainforest mantis is now sub adult , beautiful colours on this one now .

                                            Locust   2 frame focus stack 5dsr  mpe 65

Stagmatoptera females are now almost adult, the final yellow colouration is staring to show through the skin now, and they are very hungry!

                                                     single frame f13 at 1.1 with mpe 65

             and finally the Cat eye mantis ,  pre sub adult and darker in the face than before

Silver Studded Blues at Prees Heath 10 th /17 th June

It is now 10 th  June, the Cornonavirus lockdown restrictions have been partially lifted so i can now drive any distance for leisure/exercise  purposes.  Except Wales and Scotland.  so still cant go into Snowdonia .  But the Silver Studded Blue butterflies  should be emerging now at Prees Heath in Shroposhire . So with very light winds and a cloudy forecast i have driven down to see if i can photograph a few.
These butterflies quite often emerge in huge numbers, and unlike most species don't actually move very far so they are always to be seen flying low around the Bell Heather

It didnt take long to find them ,  they are roosting in the heather,   all males which are blue underwing, whereas the females are brown.  They always emerge first.

It is an old airfield , the Bell Heather has been seeded on the old runways over recent years to increase the habitat for these fairly rare butterfly.

 I have found a nice fresh male , probably emerged in the last 24 hours ,  placed it on a nice colorful dead  heather stem .  held in a small clamp.  i can now lie down low to shoot with a nice clean background .

                                            Shot with Canon 5dmk2  100mmL macro lens
                                                                f7.1  iso400  1/125 th

                                               Beautiful colours of the dead heather stems.

All the butterflies seen so far have been males ,  but after half hour of searching i have found a newly emerged female still on the heather but low down out of sight , it is cloudy and fairly cool so the males are not flying around looking for the females yet.

                                                            Female Silver Studded Blue
                                                                 f8  iso 400  1/125 th

                    Male sitting on a grass stem ,  5dsr  100mm L macro on a tripod for this one.
                                                                  f7.1    iso 500  /1/80th

It is now just gone 10 am , and the sun is breaking through the clouds and the butterflies are becoming more active.   opening there wings to the sun .

                                                               One last image of a male .

A week later on the 17 th i have come back to see if a bigger emergence has taken place , we have had quite a few thunderstorms over the last couple of days so that may have had an impact on them.  It is a bit breezy today, but much warmer than last week when i arrive and immediately i notice how much more active they are, the numbers have increased dramatically also with plenty of females spotted already , considering i only found about 6 last week.   Unfortunately most of the males are roosting but take flight as soon as i get close !

A Small Heath , there are plenty of these flying around and this one stayed motionless to allow a 4 frame focus stack.   

                           A picture clearly showing the difference between male and female.

                                                      Female on an old heather flower
                                             5dsr   f14  1/5 th sec  iso 100   tripod used

         One of dozens of females that i have found , all the males seem to be very worn already with scales missing all over the wings.

                                                        5d mk2   100mm L macro
                                                           f7.1  iso 400  1/60 th

It is just too warm now , they are all too flighty but i have just shot this beautiful female on a heather flower to finish with.   I have not found a single butterfly emerging with the ants which is disappointing.