Painted Lady Swarm

Painted Lady Swarm, originally uploaded by Photomage.

The Invasion of Painted Ladies!

Found about one thousand of these butterflies, within a small area, in St. Ouen, Jersey.

From The Telegraph:

Unusually warm weather has aided their journey from Africa.

Conservationists believe that the invasion of the species of butterfly, the Painted Lady, could be the largest seen in this country since the 1960s.

Continues here:
Invasion of the Painted Ladies

Falconry

falconry, originally uploaded by Photomage.

This is a falcon as seen at Mont Orgueil Castle which is on the Channel Island of Jersey.

Unfortunately, the light started to go not long after the display started, so I didn't get as many good photos as I would've liked.

More of my falconry photos to be found here.

A video tour of Yuri Arcurs's studio

Allow Yuri Arcurs to show you round his photo studio. It's like an Aladdin's Cave for photographers in there!



Link to the video on his blog.

A simple trick...

Demi de Pas Lighthouse, originally uploaded by Photomage.

When taking photos towards the end of the day, when the light is warm, don't use "auto white balance", set the white balance to daylight.

This will preserve the warm light tones in your photo. Auto white balance will attempt to correct the orange tones and turn the sky white, which is no good.

If you shoot in RAW mode, you don't need to worry about this setting when you shoot the photo, because you can pick a white balance setting when you process that photo on your computer.

This photo was only processed a little using Canon's Digital Photo Professional software. So, it's pretty much as seen by the human eye.

A visit to the beach

Sea, originally uploaded by Photomage.

This photo was taken with my Canon EOS 40D mounted on a tripod, and using a 580EX II flash. The lens used was a Canon EF-S 10-22mm.

The beach is Greve de Lecq, Jersey.

Nocturnal Flowers

Nocturnal Flowers, originally uploaded by Photomage.

This photo was taken in the garden using my 580EX II flash, off-camera, and fired through a white brolly. Also, I put a black background behind the flowers.

Fotonauts for sharing your photos

I've been beta testing a new photo sharing service, fotonauts, for several weeks now.

Now, you may be thinking "Oh no, not another photo sharing website", after all there's quite a few successful photo based communities out there already. But, fotonauts is well worth a look, because not only is it nice and unique looking, it does have some rather snappy and easy to use features.

For example, if you already have a ton of photos on flickr, you won't have to upload them to fotonauts because you can integrate your flickr account in fotonauts. This means you can quickly create public or private fotonauts albums, mostly by dragging and dropping with a mouse.

Once you've put together a nice album using your photos, someone else's photos, or a mix of the two, that album will automatically appear on the fotonauts website. Plus, you can grab a widget for that album, so that you can display a cool looking slide show on your website or blog.

Easy Integration

Fotonauts also optionally and easily integrates with Wikipedia, and Google Maps. Meaning that you can tie in some meaningful information to a photo without having to spend ages typing it yourself.

I metioned earlier that you can include other people's photos in any album you create. This works by a search feature which will hunt for photos on flickr which have an approprite licence, e.g. Creative Commons licence.

You can set-up an album so that only you can edit and amend it, or so that any other fotonaut members can colaborate and add photos to your album.

The service is still under beta testing, but you can ask for an invite here.

Slide show

To see a working example of a slide show see this post.

Some of my popular photos

The photos in the slide show below are those with the most views on my Flickr photostream.