My Art Workshop

We have had a shy visitor for more than a week now. He rushes in, grabs the acorns he wants and is off again. He is clearly super intelligent and keeps his distance. Yesterday however I think he decided we knew each other well enough to get introduced. He stayed and posed nicely long enough for me to get a few shots. He really is one of our most spectacular birds in Denmark. Look at that moustache!

Eurasian jay
Another little visitor is living life dangerously on our porch, sharing it with our two very welcoming cats. So far the little critter is still alive. He is wise enough to quickly shoot out of the way when anything moves nearby. But today I was quicker and got a nice shot of him.

I am renovating my blog. It has looked like this since the beginning in 2014. During that time span much has happened, that changes in here are needed. But for now I have a few photos I shot today, as I got a new toy for my camera. Three separation rings that allows me to do insanely close up macro shots. And it’s so much fun! Tiny little details, that I never noticed before, suddenly turned into works of art. It’s almost magic. 🙂

Today I had family visiting so drawing will have to wait for tomorrow. But we went for a wonderful trip to a nearby forest where we encountered and I managed to photograph not one but TWO new butterfly species. Both of them were stunningly beautiful, but the Camberwell beauty is like catching a unicorn 🙂

Camberwell beauty

The map
We also encountered a few common butterflies like the orange tip, European peacock, the common brimstone and the speckled wood. The last one I photographed.

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We met a pair of great spotted woodpeckers and the sparrowhawk as it flew over the forest.
And last but not least we encountered the cutest little black squirrel. It is an invasive color variation of our native red squirrel, but still it was cute.

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I am considering how to do the next watercolor challenge. This time it’s “Monochrome still life”. In the meantime, while I am pondering, I made apple juice. The sun is shining beautifully and the color of the juice turned out so nicely I decided to set up a small scene with it for a photo shoot.

I have been playing with some of my many photos from our Thailand trip in November. Here are a few of them that I really like.

The first one was a lucky catch of two lantern bugs sitting on a tree in Kao Sok. They look like marvelous aliens, their patterns and shape are almost unbelievably beautiful and strange too.

The cat with the unusual mismatched eyes is from the same place. She was a playful one who was occupied with hunting the Ridleys Racer cave snake in a tree just when we arrived.

I took up the hunt as well with my camera ready to shoot and got lucky catching the snake as it was casually moving away from the cat.

All the little miracles we found within a radius of perhaps 10 meters. Kao Sok is a treasury!

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Just before the sun set last evening I rushed out with the camera to catch the light. It was beautifully yellow and warm. Unfortunately I got there just one or two minutes late and a small cloud ate the sun. But the garden is filled with berries in all colors. Blue, orange, bright red, and black and white. So insted of the wonderful light I caught these two colorful hawthorn shield bugs (Acanthosoma haemorrhoidale) – in Danish: Store løvtæger.

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A month ago I, when I discovered that there was going to be a Blood Moon, I planned to stay up and catch it. Yesterday evening the event was finally here.

So after midnight when the show started, I had the camera ready to play and experiment. The Earth shadow started to move in over the Moon and it looked very strange. I had expected the Moon to be bright red, but that was not really the case. The sky was all clear and the stars were shining so brightly, but the Moon took more a brownish muddy color. I was not sure how that photography event was going to end.

But when I finally went inside, I had a few photos that were fine. The surprising and exciting thing about those were, that when I got them to my computer and looked at them, the Moon was indeed bright orange and red!

One photo was slightly better and more sharp than the others so I’ll show it here. I have adjusted the sharpness, but I haven’t touched the colors. An amazing sight!

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Today I went for a walk. I wanted to practice macro photography, but the wind was strong, and the critters I had hoped to practice on, had probably gone into hiding. I went to the closest local little strap of forest, since the wood pecker in there kept yelling at me.

In the forest I encountered a few insects and flowers to practice macro shots on after all. Best shot was this fly. But soon mosquitoes found me irresistible, so I ended up fleeing the forest and went for the local road instead.

The jersey cows there are always fun to watch and today was no exception. One of them had just given birth to a tiny calf. When I walked by it had just learned to stand, but walking was still hard! I took a few photographs, but the cow did not like me being there, so I soon moved on. It was a beautiful day for photography again 🙂

Today has been glorious. Weather was perfect and I was off by my bike around 10am. I went all the way to Langå and back home in the other side of the river, around 22 km in all.

I had barely left home before a deer presented itself for a perfect photoshoot. After that great start the wild animals were just lining up – rare and less rare. A few kilometers further down the road I nearly hit a water snake baby, and as I stopped to look at it as it fled out of sight, I discovered a bright almost fluorescent yellow spider – a cucumer spider.

I also met the aurora butterfly, the least weasel, and a lot of birds along the river. When I was nearly home I met another photographer and had a good chat with him, getting all the good tips of wildlife photo opportunities in the area right now.

Surprisingly many of my photos turned out really good. I guess that my friends Glenn´s and Ray´s efforts to teach me how to use my camera properly is slowly paying off.

When I got home I thought this was enough adventure for today. But this evening Oscar, the rabbit, returned from his winter hiding and ran straight over our meadow and lawn. Good to see he is still alive and kicking. Later as dusk kicked in, a fox took the same route. We rarely see those so close to the house. Sadly – by this time it was too dark to take pictures.