Mostly Digital Photography

I bought some new cacti recently, and two arrived with flower buds on them. This is the more advanced one – expect a photo of the second one soon!

The question of how to display them is also proving an interesting challenge. I’ve bought some quite nice pots (1 shown here), and I also have bought a sheet of perspex to put on a table to avoid scratching or marking the table top, but I am now investigating 3D printing some saucers to stand the pots on, or perhaps for making some more pots. It is about40 years since I was involved in producing any 3D models, and things have changed in that time!

As a change from photos from the lily pond in the park, here is a picture of a lily in the back garden.

Yesterday a new update of Capture One was released, so today’s priority was to see if the changes to tethering made the Fujifilm cameras perform better. I’m happy to report that this is a considerable improvement on the previously available tethering, although there still seem problems making some adjustments to settings while tethered (perhaps related to the fact that some settings on the camera are made with dedicated dials).

This young woodpecker shows some signs of losing its juvenile colours already.

A visit to the lily pond to feed the ducklings – electrically powered of course, but a Nano conversion from before Brompton produced their own electric model.

I could not use the ducklings again for the main photo, so I hope you like the lily – not usually this open at 07:00 in the morning.

But the ducklings are still (for me) irresistible, so the extra shows them again. On my first lap of the park their mother seemed absent, and the ducklings seemed to with they were back in the nest, and stayed as close-packed a this for several minutes. By the time I got back on the second lap, the mother was back again, and they spread out a little bit – though they still don’t seem to have realised mealworms make good food! The earlier brood certainly like the mealworms.

Now on my third puncture on the mobility scooter in less than 5 weeks, and I’m only doing 2Km a day for about 4 days a week.

The alarm has gone off each night for the last 2 days, nothing to cause it. Now, as I type this, we have had a short power failure which has set of neighbours’ alarms, but not mine.

When I went to the lily pond in the park I found a second family of ducklings had appeared – still tiny and the first time they had been see. There are 8, although one is missing in this photo. They still seem very cautious, and soon retired amongst the reeds.

The 6 remaining members of the first family are still around, now looking considerably larger, and with a huge appetite for mealworms.

I haven’t seen much of the woodpeckers in the last few weeks, and I was rather worried that they had not produced any young this year. So I was delighted to see a juvenile (fully-grown, unaccompanied by parents, and well-able to look after itself) yesterday – but I didn’t have a camera in position then. It was back again several times today, ad I was ready for it (though not a particularly good photo, even though the best of 200).

And surprisingly the Fuji X-T2 worked in remote mode, though the battery does not last long, thought the X-H1 was still inclined to drop the connection at the least provocation.