A Summer's Afternoon in a Garden

An old Victorian laundry wringer, now discarded and being overgrown in a corner.
f/3.5 --- 1/800 sec --- ISO 100 --- 24mm

I had a lot of fun taking these pictures. It was really my first attempt at "crawling around a flower garden."
I'm not as agile as I'd like to be and lumping a big heavy camera around didn't make for an easy shoot.
But the day was warm and there was no time pressure -  for a change.
I was going to say that I quite like dereliction, but that wouldn't be true. To be honest, for the most part, it's an eyesore. But photographically, it can provide some very interesting subjects.
This wringer for example.
It has been gently rotting away, broken and unloved, probably for decades. But just there, at that moment, in that position with the bindweed growing through it, I thought it was just lovely and I couldn't resist shooting it from every conceivable angle.
This was the final result and I have used it many times, both as it is and in monochrome.

Cabbage White on a Purple Flower
f/4 --- 1/1000 sec --- ISO 100 --- 70mm










Ah, the Cabbage White Butterfly.
Bane of kitchen gardeners everywhere. The hours I have spent trying to protect my brassicas from these little devils!
But actually, when you get up close, and you haven't got any cabbages to worry about, they are actually quite beautiful.
I don't have any dedicated macro lenses, so I couldn't follow my ethos of getting up close and personal with my subject. Apart from anything else, every time I pointed my camera at one of these insects, it flew away.
I don't mind admitting that I was getting pretty fed up with almost capturing one. So when this one managed to stay still for a whole five seconds, I didn't waste a moment.
The shot didn't look like much on the camera's little screen, but I hope you'll agree, the full-size result was very pleasing.

Eryngium Bee Magnet
f/6.3 --- 1/640 sec --- ISO 100 --- 70mm

I have discovered that using a decent telephoto lens can produce results that are very close to what you might achieve with macro.
The "middle" lens of my three USM II lenses is 24-70mm, so it is, technically, a telephoto or zoom. But the maximum focal length is relatively short so I still had to get in reasonably close. Which could have been a problem around bees.
On this particular afternoon, the Eryngium were in full flower, and the bees could not have been less interested in me if they had tried. Which is just as well as I am seriously allergic to pain and I didn't fancy getting stung.
There are beehives in the corner of this particular garden and so the flowers were, quite literally crawling with the little chaps.
I have, perhaps, still a way to go with insect photography but I was pleased with the contrast between foreground and background in this shot.







Pollen Collection
f/7.1 --- 1/400 sec --- ISO 100 --- 70mm

This was taken on a different day, and in a different place, but I have included it because, to date, it is probably the best shot of an insect that I have taken. I think I would have liked it to have been facing towards me but, well, he wasn't taking direction at that particular moment!