Colourful

In a party mood:

Grainy hand hermit, Pagurus granosimanus

The local hermit crabs, from here in our northern shores, look a bit grungy, clad in camouflage greys and greens, under our normal muted daylight, especially underwater. But under a bright light, it turns out that they're as brightly coloured as any of the tropical critters.

This was taken with double flash, the overhead tank light, plus two bright LED lights a couple of inches away. The hermit didn't seem to mind at all.

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Los cangrejos ermitaños de nuestras costas norteñas están vestidos en colores de lodo, en camuflaje gris y verde grisaceo, vistos bajo la luz del dia, nunca muy fuerte aquí en la isla y aún más tenue dentro del agua. Pero con una luz más fuerte, resulta que tienen colores tan brillantes como cualquiera de las criaturas tropicales.

Para esta foto, usé el flash con un esclavo auxiliar (dos), la luz normal del tanque, y además dos luces LED, a unas dos pulgadas de distancia. No parecía que la luz molestaba al ermitaño en absoluto.

Practice makes ... well, a bit better.

I have a lot to learn about my camera and its possibilities. On lazy days, sometimes I spend a few hours just practicing, and then tossing hundreds of photos.

Laurie found these mushrooms in a dry spot near the rhododendrons. I haven't tried to ID them, instead spent time playing around with the lighting, trying to get true colours indoors without extensive Photoshopping afterwards. I photographed them on the kitchen counter against a blue background, to tone down the yellow of the overhead light, which is supposedly "soft white". These turned out almost right; the rest were deleted at first glance.

(I did a bit of post processing, mostly to clean up scattered dust and lighten one where the flash failed to work.)

A bit too much yellow from room light.

Better, but I had to lighten it up, so the blue background almost disappeared.

These look about right.

And I took a spore print, half on black, half on plain white paper. The spores turned out charcoal grey.

The half on white paper. Not very informative, but there's no lighting problem here; I scanned the print.