Older, but no wiser

You wouldn't believe how many failed shots of tadpoles it takes to get just a couple of passable results. The combination of light loss through the polariser resulting in large aperture and consequent narrow depth of field, manual focus so as see through the water's surface, shaky hands holding a 400mm equivalent lens at a metre distance... yeah, I know; bad workman blames his tools and all that. But I guess these are taken at the border of what's achievable in the circumstances. One moderate success to a couple of dozen failures.

But who's counting, anyway? Sitting cross-legged at the end of the pond, the sun on my back, oblivious to the outside world, absorbed in the lives of those who populate this watery universe in front of me - what better way to spend to warm and sunny Saturday afternoon?

We keep fishing out the blanket weed (Spyrogyra) that drapes this fella's nose, but I read today that that just releases more spores and make it grow all the more.

Two way traffic (unless they're up to something else. I confess I don't know much about the reproductive habits of snails):

I'm still getting to grips with the 45 - 200mm lens on the Panasonic G1. Sometimes things come out okay, sometimes they don't. This one was okay-ish. It's not a macro lens, closest focus is a metre, hence this is a crop. Nowhere near as good a result as I could get with the old Olympus C8080. As far as I know, Panasonic haven't announced any plans for a macro lens for the G1 yet.

The pond's not a year old, yet it's fascinating how much life congregates around water. These Large Red Damselflies for instance: