mostlypixels 4 weeks ago • 100%
That, sir, is not a butt, but a blep. Gorgeous pic tho!
A meadow scorpionfly snacking on a dead caterpillar (peacock butterfly), next to (*mayyyybe?*) the cocoon of the parasite that killed the caterpillar.
I'm not entirely sure of the subspecies. They are tiny, adorable, and *really* favor tansy.
mostlypixels 4 weeks ago • 100%
Oh wow, gorgeous bird!
mostlypixels 1 month ago • 100%
Thank you!
Possibly "Colletes daviesanus". Tiny and cute.
Females do not, actually, have the orange tips on their wings, but the patterns on the underside are gorgeous.
Yellow-legged Mining Bee (Andrena flavipes). They're cute as heck so I'm gonna be stalking their foraging area.
mostlypixels 6 months ago • 100%
It is!
mostlypixels 6 months ago • 100%
Thank you so much!
mostlypixels 6 months ago • 100%
Right?!
mostlypixels 6 months ago • 100%
Thank you! A proper camera (R7) with a 85mm lens :) I know some people manage great macro with their phones, but I couldn't have gotten close enough with a phone, the bees hurried back into their tunnels whenever I got near.
Grey backed mining bee (Andrena vaga) waiting for me to get away from her nest.
mostlypixels 6 months ago • 100%
Herons look so incredibly cool. Until you see them from the front, of course. Gorgeous shot!
I know they're not rare or anything, but it's the first time I get to observe some. Sorry for the shaky video, I keep forgetting to take a beanbag.
mostlypixels 6 months ago • 100%
You drive through the fields and spot a dishevelled young woman hunching over roadkill, reaching into the corpse with pliers as flies buzz around her. You accidentally make eye contact just as she - grinning - drops a writhing maggot into a translucent plastic bottle.
mostlypixels 7 months ago • 100%
I love it too! I wish I had noticed it when the picture was taken, because it's gorgeous.
A birch catkin bug invited itself. ![Birch Catkin Bug](https://pics.letsfail.com/tb/800/800/LUsuhuqO27.jpg)
mostlypixels 7 months ago • 100%
Bees are macro on hard mode, they never stop moving. You did a fantastic job. I always end up using burst mode and prayer. Have fun experimenting!
mostlypixels 7 months ago • 100%
She looks like she's wearing a pollen crown!
mostlypixels 7 months ago • 100%
The bees are the best. They get SO dusty. Also: can I see, please?
mostlypixels 7 months ago • 100%
90% "that's amazing, I had no idea it looked so cool" and 10% "what is this ungodly abomination, let me unsee this" in my experience :)
I got myself extension tubes and it just happened to be THE season.
mostlypixels 7 months ago • 100%
Why settle when I could get a 800mm 5.6 for a mere 14k?
mostlypixels 7 months ago • 100%
The only reason I didn't impulse buy a teleconverter to tack on my impulse bought 600mm is that it would just get me (more) underexposed pictures. But the urge is real, and we don't even have bald eagles around here.
mostlypixels 8 months ago • 100%
I saw some active webrings on neocities sites!
mostlypixels 8 months ago • 100%
Try cloudhiker
It's based on a template, I made it for the Afternoon Tea pixel club: https://lostletters.neocities.org/afternoontea/ which you should check out :)
mostlypixels 10 months ago • 100%
Thanks! He's so puffy, I figured he was cold.
mostlypixels 10 months ago • 100%
Gorgeous photograph. How cold was it outside that day?
mostlypixels 10 months ago • 100%
Such a beautiful bird
mostlypixels 10 months ago • 100%
Amazing scene! That must have been great to watch. Less so to hear!
mostlypixels 10 months ago • 100%
A handsome boi!
mostlypixels 10 months ago • 100%
So mossy. It's beautiful!
mostlypixels 10 months ago • 100%
Everyone needs to head to that mastodon account because there is a whole series of amazingly adorable photo to pixel pieces!
mostlypixels 10 months ago • 100%
This is so disheartening. The more into nature photography I get, the more I realise how smart and chill bees are and the more I love them. I hope research like this will lead to better protection, but I don't have high hopes...
mostlypixels 10 months ago • 100%
"Did they see me? Naaah. I am perfectly hidden behind this tall grass!"
mostlypixels 11 months ago • 100%
Such a beautiful area. I love that golden light.
mostlypixels 11 months ago • 100%
Aw, thank you! I'm glad you like it!
mostlypixels 1 year ago • 100%
All I can find is this: https://askentomologists.com/2015/02/25/through-the-compound-eye/ (and it's pretty interesting, tbh)
mostlypixels 1 year ago • 100%
Me too! It's been bugging me that I'll never know.
It seemed to be doing fine as far as "racing over plants and climbing from leaf to leaf" was concerned.
mostlypixels 1 year ago • 100%
That spider must be quite pleased. That catch is almost as big as it is.
mostlypixels 1 year ago • 100%
I saw php error logs cause a full disk in a few minutes (thankfully on a shared dev server), thanks to an accidental endless loop that just flooded everything with a wall of notices...
And, working with a CMS that allows third-party plugins that don't bother to catch exceptions, aggressive web crawlers are not a good thing to encounter on a weekend... 1 exception x 400000 product pages makes for a loooot of text.
mostlypixels 1 year ago • 100%
*Looks guiltily at the kalimba sitting on her bookshelf.* I absolutely do not see what you mean. At all.
Reflective surfaces are horrible to photograph through and I have no tips. For the low light, is it because brightness might disturb the tarantulas? Otherwise, DIY photo light boxes might be of help and they are cheap-ish to make. Maybe try to put your phone on a stand/bean bag, adjust the focus (if your phone lets you), and set a timer, so the phone will not move while it takes the picture (if the spiders are very mobile, you might be out of luck).
mostlypixels 1 year ago • 100%
On the tarantulas: that's fantastic. Will you be posting pics somewhere?
On photography:
So I started out with a an entry level canon camera (eos 4000D) which was only 280€.
I immediately discovered that wasn't good enough for birds, so I ordered a 55-250mm telescopic lens two days later.
I then saw a heron on the other side of a river and I was salt incarnate because I couldn't zoom enough, so I impulse bought a 1500€ 150-600mm lens (and a tripod because that stuff weights around 2.5kg).
The whole process took two weeks. Then, maybe a month later, covid hit and I remembered I really like being inside and the gear collected dust for three years.
Cue this summer. "You should go outside and take pictures again," I told myself. And so I started taking pictures of bugs. But I was not satisfied with the quality of the pictures: bugs need a really fast shutter speed and an aperture that will allow to get more than a 2mm slice of them sharp.
So I ordered a 1500€ semi-pro camera.
But that camera came with a different type of mount, so my existing lenses were not compatible! And the adapter ring was out of stock for the foreseeable future!
So I bought a 600€ macro lens.
And then a led light to use with it on cloudy days.
And a monopod.
I might need a polarizing filter, a sect of reflectors, and extension tubes to get higher magnification.
...
I hope that horror story helped keep you (and anyone who reads this) away from photography. ADHD people especially: NO. DO NOT. DON'T.
mostlypixels 1 year ago • 100%
This is AMAZING! Thank you! Gosh, those translucent jelly babies. Fascinating video (also TIL the "egg" becomes the abdomen, which is really cool).
As an aside, looking at the man's setup, I'm starting to think that bug keeping might just compete with photography in the "bottomless money pit" category. Tell me it isn't so.
mostlypixels 1 year ago • 100%
Not iNaturalist, but observations.be, where I've been playing real life Pokemon for a month or so now. For the most part, I found myself a nice overgrown spot between a parking lot and train tracks, and I'm documenting everything I find there.
mostlypixels 1 year ago • 100%
I had to google this one to make sense of what I was seeing. Pretty amazing looking insect.
mostlypixels 1 year ago • 100%
Define "slow creep", because my experience has been "Wednesday, get into photography again. Saturday, buy a Canon R7 and a macro lens.". Which is roughly the spending timeline of that time I got into bird photography and splurged on telescopic lenses. Hyperfixations are fun! (And educational!)
The plastic containers are genius. I'll bookmark that!
mostlypixels 1 year ago • 100%
Stellar explanation, thank you! Those wasps are absurdly cute for creatures born of baby murder, by the way. The link you gave is fantastic, too.
As for "hardly noticing": macro photography fixes that problem, for better or worse (nothing like noticing a parasitic worm coming out of a cricket's butt while reviewing your pictures in full 4k :D ). I take photos of everything even mildly suspicious, just in case.
Hi! Sorry, very new at the whole "bugs" thing, and I'm still learning. I spotted this the other day (not sure of the stink bug species, possibly Nezara viridula), promptly spent hours watching macro timelapses of stink bugs hatching, going from gooey babies to hard shelled nymphs... Now to the question which has been bugging me: is there such a thing as "too late to hatch"? Can they "harden" inside the egg and just die there (maybe in the blackened eggs)? Thanks! ## Edit: I found another nest of the same species and took it home. So: have a top view of the hatched eggs and some first instar nymphs while I'm at it! ![](https://pics.letsfail.com/tb/800/800/yAMacuQu07.jpg)
Some kind of stink bug. No precise ID since the identification apps say the nymphs are a species that does not match the eggs at all. Edit: Nezara viridula
She goes into the Hell Bag for roughly 15 minutes a month, the time it takes to get her monthly Old Kitty Medicine (which comes as a jab). She earned the Hell Bag (aka bathing bag) after requiring sedation and injuring her Human during the first home visit from the vet. Totally unrelated, but her teeth are in remarkably good, pointy, stabby condition for a 14 year old cat.
Wallonia, Belgium, today. I stumbled upon a plant covered with small bundles of aphids, and sure enough, upon closer inspection, it had a whole aphid farming operation going on, and ladybugs had found it. The ant tried blocking the way but fell off. Hopefully it's okay somewhere. The aphids, unfortunately, will not be. ![Ant defending aphids against ladybug](https://pics.letsfail.com/tb/800/800/MUfADIjE93.jpg)
Trying out my new camera and lens. I didn't expect getting such good results with no practice on the R7, but it does 99% of the job.
Edit: `Halictus scabiosae`, identified through observations.be with 99% certainty. What am I looking at? Except a very industrious little worker? How do I go about figuring it out? Is there some reliable site that would allow me to refine by stripes and such? Thanks. This is Wallonia, Belgium. I got a new camera, which allows me to get much more detailed *entirely useless* pictures! I was one with the bees for an entire hour, came home with 500 pictures, and this is the *only* photo I got of this one. The stripe pattern struck me, with the very sharp lines, but I have no head, no thorax, no nothing...
Hi there. I unfortunately ran out of smol criminals of my own to post here, so I figured I would help my fellow birb law enforcement agents to get more work done, with helpful tutorials from the internet. The videos are not mine. I like that photographer a *lot* and he is single-handedly responsible for that one time I captured an actually good picture of a birb. He's good at what he does. He loves what he does. He does NOT yell at the viewer (which is appreciated, ISO settings do not need to be discussed at a decibel volume equal to said iso settings). He has excellent underhanded tricks to get smol criminals to commit crimes on camera. His pictures are lovely. Check it out. Do what he does. Then post your results here so I can enjoy them, thank you very much, byyyye :D
Wavre, Belgium, today ♥ I *knew* there were chaffinches in town, I hear their calls on the regular, but I hadn't managed to see one up close yet.
*Finally*. I kept hearing them and not seeing them. Very frustrating.
Very efficient killer. He didn't miss a single fish in the three hours I watched him, and he was also catching dragonflies as they flew by.
Han-sur-Lesse Wildlife Park, Belgium ![Closeup](https://pics.letsfail.com/tb/800/800/mOTIcOsi88.jpg)
I promise not to spam this community with random pics, but I *adore* common blues, and was delighted when I stumbled upon this. I somehow never see them in pairs. I figured I'd share!
Or less possibly a willow tit? I can't tell. Belgium, Wallonia.
[The opml](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mostlypixels/bringbackrss/main/static/opml/news/news_and_mags.opml) I aimed at granularity, by gathering *all* the feeds I could find for each website. If you import the opml as it is, you will drown in duplicate articles, so I recommend cherry-picking the feeds you want. What I learned while preparing this: * Feedbro is your friend and can autodetect all feeds on a page, if they are listed * Some CMS automatically generate feeds for the categories, so it's worth trying to tack "/rss" or "/feed" somewhere in the URL, you never know * I love FreshRSS
From that year when a coot decided to nest right on the edge of the Louvain La Neuve lake (Belgium), next to a walking path. I was blessed. ![Nest picture of baby and mom(?)](https://pics.letsfail.com/tb/1200/1200/VuvUmAPO24.jpg)