Hi all, today's assortment is a mess of stuff I took with varying levels of skill, and requiring equally varying crops. First up is the cicada I transported home in my water bottle from my weekly Sunday Tuesday ride with a friend. It survived the trip & subsequent photography, flying away, perhaps to lay eggs in one of my maple trees:) Who knows, I might still be in this house in another 17 years to greet its progeny...

The rest of these were shot on our daily walk of 16Jun, with the tamron lens, from about 8:30–9:15pm; I was so impressed with the weird composition with the milkweed at the top & butterfly at the bottom (which I cropped more tightly to emphasize this quality) but it looked way better in my imagination than it does on the screen. I think the butterfly is some sort of skipper, perhaps a mulberry wing; and I'm sure the flower is some sort of milkweed, possibly white swamp milkweed.

Next up a couple of canada nodding thistles^[1] , because I simply can not resist photographing flowers...

I'm including this pic of a robin because I like the way the setting sun coloured the tree trunks the same as its breast, plus, contrasty bokeh.

I didn't really think I could get any of the moon's texture with just 180mm of lens, but actually, it's not too bad, with sufficient underexposure:

However, to get the craters, you pretty much have to make the sky black, or at least deep indigo, regardless of what it actually is, so despite this being shot in bright light with a blue sky, the original looks like night-time.^[2] I didn't wholly bring it back to azure—think I'd wanna work from RAW to attempt that—but you get the idea.

Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.

Sylvus Tarn