Work was the usual “ugh” on Monday, but the rest of the day was agreeable. The weather after work was pleasant enough to send up a drone to get a distant storm hovering over farms south of town.

There was also the loud buzzing and thrumming of insects in the lilac and Mountain Ash buds in our front and back yards. Not a lot of bees so far, which is concerning, but lots of other insects for sure.



I am still working the lilacs hard, as is obvious. I’m trying to be a bit different than just hitting them with a macro, but nothing I’ve gotten with the Helios and Bubble Bokeh lens has worked well these past two days. Frustrating. I will keep experimenting, of course.

Finding and capturing the ant in the front flower bed was more of a happy accident than anything else. I was particularly tickled to have gotten it with Ray’s Canon EOS 7D he left me. Ray was a bug guy and he would have approved.

There are two Mountain Ash trees in our yard. The one at the far back is the least healthy and the birds don’t seem to like the berries from it much because it is the last one to get stripped. The one to the right of our deck is much healther, but it also blooms two weeks later. it is now in the process of coming to life.

The late evening clouds had lots of character and I was excited at the prospect of a dramatic sunset, especially as the wild wind from the past week wasn’t anywhere to be found. Yah, nope. Nearly all the clouds buggered off just before the sun hit the horizon.


I got two decent enough sunset images from different vantage points a moment or so apart, and that was it for the day. Work didn’t kill me, I got to swing a camera around, and I wound up with a few images I liked.

The top and two bottom panoramics were made with my DJI Mini 3 drone. The rest were made using the Canon EOS 7D and Canon 70-300mm EF IS USM f4.5-5.6 lens that Ray left to me.