The weather was highly volatile today. It was rainy, then sunny, and all the variations in between, not only once but quite a few times from dawn till dusk.
At about nine o'clock in the morning, I went for a walk in Palera, an agriculture-oriented area near the village of Liznjan, after buying a few things in one of the two supermarkets of Medulin, my hometown. After a short drive that got me quickly across the five or six kilometers that separate my house and Palera, I parked by the side of the unpaved road, hoping to get enough dry time for a decent amount of good photographs that could lead to something fairly interesting for today's post.
Now, after preparing the good shots and deleting the bad and unnecessary ones, I must confess that I'm pretty satisfied with what I caught in a little less than an hour in between two periods of rain.
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Right in the center of this opening picture, you can see a Sonchus oleraceus flower, which looks a bit like a little star lost in the sea of green vegetation, almost like a floral version of the sun hidden behind the thick layer of clouds.
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All the flowers I encountered today looked great, as they always do, but ...
... but the real highlight of the photographic experience was a multitude of tiny droplets left by the recent rain.
Those found on the juicy red petals of the common poppies (Papaver rhoeas) were the most spectacular of them all.
To show them at their best, I had to manage to get a clear shot in the pretty low natural light. The shutter speed had to be relatively low. Considering the gentle but persistent wind that was blowing, it was a bit of a challenge.
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Here you can take a good, up-close look at the exuberant interior of the poppy. For this easy shot, I used the small built-in flash of my versatile and reliable Canon PowerShot SX60 HS camera.
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The poppy flowers in their prime are certainly showy and beautiful, but ...
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... but the bent flowerbuds that resemble weird alien pods out of a SyFy movie, too heavy for the stems that hold them, don't look too bad either.
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These things look great in the diffuse ambient light provided by a cloudy day.
The following photograph ...
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... was taken with a little help from the flash, one of my very good friends. You can see a bunch of buds hanging together on the same plant.
In this case, the artificial light was quite useful in separating the green subject of the photograph from the background of the same color.
A few minutes later, in the dense vegetation close to the ground under the flowerbuds ...
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... I found a well-camouflaged caterpillar. This is the larval stage of a moth. A moth from the Noctuidae, very probably. I'm almost sure about that. However, I can't tell you the name of the species. With quite a few similar-looking caterpillars around, identifying the correct one isn't an easy task for a non-expert like me. It could be something from the genus Helicoverpa.
In the following photograph ...
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... the Tettigonia viridissima nymph is posing on the red petals of the poppy. These are the only two insects I photographed today. It's a botanical post, for the most part.
Here you can see two Sonchus oleraceus flowers photographed in natural light.
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This wide shot taken with the flash includes a bit of the scenery and shows a bigger chunk of the same plant commonly known as the common sowthistle.
Here you can take another look at the beautiful droplets on the poppies.
The droplets illuminated by the flash were too flat and uniformly colored to look really great, but they had a certain charm. Well, at least in certain compositions.
There isn't much to say about this photograph. Just another group of droplets. Hope you like them as much as I do.
These two were photographed in the same ambient light, but the light was coming from a slightly different direction.
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Here you can see another group of poppies. Nothing new under the overcast sky.
This is a portrait of yet another droplet illuminated by the flash - nothing new in front of the macro lens either.
Now, you may argue that this looks more like a group portrait that includes more than one droplet to you, but nope - only one of them is in focus, and therefore the main subject of the shot. I'm not saying that I'm necessarily right here, but I have a counterargument ready, as you can see.
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This is yet another lovely flowerbud portrait in natural light.
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And that's it. As always, here on Hive, the photographs are my work. THE END.
