Insect, Holding on!

I was supposed to be taking landscape photographs but the sunrise was a bust and the sky was white -- then I happened along this little fellow and loved the way his legs were wrapped around the plant!

Nature Photographers Network Editor's Pick Award

My (Lisa) photograph of a bumblebee on a flower (http://www.naturephotographers.net/imagecritique/ic.cgi?a=vp&pr=90906)
won a Nature Photographers Network Editor's Pick Award this week in the macro/close-up section.



Every week, a single photo is selected from each of the NPN photo critique galleries and placed on permanent display in this special gallery. At the end of the year, three photos from each category are selected from this gallery and receive an Editor’s Pick Award.

The Editor's Picks 17 Feb. '08: Some really outstanding work posted this week! Congratulations to Ron Dudley (Avian), Ellen deBoer (ESS), Lon Sharp (Fauna), Jeff Mitchell (Flora), Lisa Cuchara (M/CU), Arthur Sevestre (M&N), David Kelly (PA) and Stan Rose (WC #318 - "Valentines Day") Go see 'em all here. You guys and gals rock - thanks for your participation!

Fall at Indian Wells

This Fall has been very amenable to getting outside -- the weather has been just perfect and the days inspiring. I had the 70-200mm lens on my Canon but FORGOT my 67mm Moose polarizer. I LOVE my polarizer but it was not a very sunny day and we were photographing in the woods pretty late in the afternoon so I tried to get along without it. I ended up holding the 77mm Moose polarizer in front of the lens because I just did not like the water, the leaves and the overall glare without the polarizer. This just reinforced for me why I love my Moose polarizer so much. The first image is w/o the polarizer and the second one with me holding the polarizer in front of the lens (same tripod location, same camera settings).

These photos were all taken Sunday at Indian Wells. I was photographing the stream and turned around and found this fallen tree with all these great mushrooms growing on it. I have ~45 different compositions and depth of fields. Sometimes the images shot at f22 were not simple enough. This vertical I took at f8, f11 and f22 and I prefer the one at f8 because you are not as distracted by everything going on at the left and your eyes can settle in on the ones on the right.

Tom took these images of the main waterfall while I worked the stream.