Category: Nature photography

My nature photography, mainly insects and mainly from Townsville

Broadwater camping ground revisited

Braoadwater State Forest near Abergowrie is basically a pine plantation so it’s not of any great interest to naturalists or bushwalkers such as myself. However, a very pleasant camping ground and a small patch of rainforest are hidden away between the pine trees and the creek so I’ve been there a few times.

My first visit, and the most rewarding in terms of birdwatching, was nearly ten years ago. I was there again in 2021 and posted a few photos to mark the occasion, and I have just been back once more. I knew it would be quite wet. That didn’t bother me because I had no ambitions to do anything more than relax in beautiful natural surroundings, which is precisely what I did. Mission accomplished!

But I did take a few photos.

Broadwater - hills in cloud
Looking across the creek to the hills

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Tiny fly, tinier prey

fly and prey
Fly and prey

“But the predators, the carnivores, come in all sizes from Scrub Turkeys down to the tiny metallic green-gold flies we see around the garden all the time. They are aerial hunters, like miniature dragonflies, and if we had a microscope we might even see their prey,” I said in my previous post.

I had included a photo of one of those little Long-legged Flies, Dolichopodidae, in the post before that, to illustrate the limits of my smartphone camera. The flies are about 5 mm long, quite a bit smaller than a house fly, and I wasn’t surprised that the smartphone struggled to capture them.

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Smartphone macrophotography

This is a follow-up to Photographing insects with your phone (2020), bringing it up to date by seeing what a current mid-range phone can do.

In Cameras for rambling greenies (2021) on my other blog I floated the idea that smartphones would soon become good backup cameras. The impending obsolescence of my phone made me look into that more seriously and put ‘good camera’ near the top of what I wanted in my new phone. Recommendations on tech sites and from friends led me to a Pixel 8.

Insects

I’ve been wandering round the garden with it, seeing how well it goes with insects and flowers. My conclusions in 2020 were that smartphone insect photography was worthwhile so long as you bear three rules in mind:

  • Rule 1: Get as close as you can.
  • Rule 2: Zooming in doesn’t help much because “digital zoom” makes your subject look bigger on screen but doesn’t capture any more detail.
  • Rule 3: Be prepared to crop the image drastically if your subject is small.

First impressions of the Pixel 8 is that the camera is indeed better but its faults and limitations are similar. That is, I’m seeing an evolution, not a revolution. Here are a few of its best efforts with very small subjects, showing the camera hitting its limits.

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Sunrise from Mount Stuart

Mount Stuart dominates Townsville’s skyline and the views from its summit are well worth the drive through Wulguru and up the winding access road. Anyone arriving before dawn on a clear dry-season day, as I did on Monday, is doubly rewarded: sunrise is spectacularly beautiful.

These views appear in sequence from pre-sunrise, just before 6.30, to full daylight. Most of them look towards the sunrise from the carpark side of the summit; only one of them (Magnetic Island) is from the Lookout.

Mt Elliott from Mt Stuart
Mt Elliott from Mt Stuart

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Uncommon wildlife on the Common

Town Common wetland
Wetland near Tegoora Rock

The weather has been a bit warm for enjoyable walking the last few months unless one gets out very early and doesn’t stay too long, as I said a year ago (funny, that) in a post celebrating my return to the Town Common. Yesterday was my first extended, enjoyable, walk there for a couple of months. I drove in to Freshwater bird hide and walked from there to the track junction near Tegoora Rock and back.

sunbird on grass stem
Sunbird perching on a grass stem, reming us how small they are.

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