people places n things
Early evening visitor
Originally I had planned to water the plants in my garden before lunch this afternoon, but those plans got rescheduled because of a list of other tasks that I just didn't get done fast enough. And with a trip to the bank and Lowe's hardware store still on my to do list as well, the plants in my front yard were going to wait until this evening to get something to drink.
I have a fare number plants in the front yard to water and it takes a while for me to get to them all, and the sunlight was disappearing fast as I worked my way through them. After watering the ones directly in front of the house I moved to the the ones that run between me and my neighbor Cliff and Jessica's house. As my watering can gently sprinkled some of my Black Eyed Susan's I spotted a slim brown figure in the quickly growing shadows of the early evening light that I knew right away was a small praying mantis, the first to visit me that I've been lucky enough to spot in the 15 years since I've owned my house.
I really wanted to photograph him but resisted at first because I strongly prefer available light shooting to flash, and that was going to be impossible with my D300s now decidedly old in the tooth (come on Nikon give us a D400 already!!!) and not nearly light sensitive enough to give me a shutter speed sufficient for such a task. But I did own a few light modifiers for my built in flash, and one of them would probably be successful in this type of condition to eliminate the harsh shadows that my built in flash would create, so I stopped watering the plants for a bit and attempted to capture some shots of the cute little guy while the getting was good.
My camera's light sensor is simply too weak to focus in light this low and it hunted back and forth endlessly every time I tried to take an auto focus shot. So finally I decided to focus all the shots manually. Brutal a task it turned out to be as the image in my view finder was so dark it was impossible to tell for sure if any of the shots were really in focus or not. But focusing manually is not new to me so that did help and maybe 4 or 5 shots ended up in focus.
Soon I was back to watering my garden in now near darkness and the last thing I saw of my little visitor was of him heading toward the shelter of my Wichita blue to get away from the rain shower I was giving my plants. Hope he didn't get too wet!
my front yardpraying mantisNYCStaten Islandsummernatureinsectssld3
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