Saturday, May 19, 2012

Damselflies in Pensacola

 I recently moved to Pensacola to go back to school and I've only started to explore the nature trails around here. This morning I went to the Edward Ball Nature Trail, which is right next to the UWF campus. There's a nice boardwalk through the woods there and it leads to a place for people to ride their mountain bikes, which I haven't been to yet.

The first six photos here were taken with my 105mm macro lens in P mode, which tends to choose a low F number like 2.8. I found I got better photos of the skink with a higher number, such as 13 though. The nice thing about P mode is that if you don't like the settings the camera chooses, you can roll the click wheel and get different settings that should have the same level of exposure.

I took a number of photos of the damselflies on this trail. These metallic blue ones are larger than the ones I usually see in South Florida.








Skinks like this one are very common on this trail. I mostly just heard them running through the leaves when I approached, but this one stayed put long enough for me to take a photo.

These photos of this slow-moving stream were taken with my 18-55mm zoom lens, which was the kit lens that came with my camera.



A Magnolia flower. I tweaked the colors a bit in Photoshop for this one.