Abbey House Gardens

A visit to Abbey House Gardens in Malmesbury in early September. I seem to have taken quite a lot of photos of bees this year, and am quite pleased with these two. Nikon D200, Cosina 100mm macro lens, 1/250 @ f11, ISO 250 Nikon D200, Cosina 100mm macro lens, 1/320 @ f8, ISO 400 And finally I rather like the colours, light and shadow on this. Nikon D200, Cosina 100mm macro lens, 1/640 @ f8, ISO 160...
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The garden

These were actually taken on the same day as the previous ones, later in the afternoon. This is a courgette flower, in the evening sunlight at the front of the house. Panasonic FX-37, 26mm equiv, 1/500 @ f4, ISO 100   One of our lilys - I think the water droplets come from watering rather than rain. Panasonic FX-37, 26mm equiv, 1/200 @ f2.8, ISO 100   This one is much less arty than the others, but does show just how many vegetables we* were growing! The plants in the blue Ikea bags are green beans, runner beans, peas, mange-tout and petit-pois, while the stuff in the black buckets at the front are potatoes. The metal cages you can make out at the back are supporting the tomatoes. Some of the tomatoes are still going, 6ft tall and with massive fruit. We've already made two batches of green tomato chutney (one of them a huge batch) as well as tomato sauce and tomato soup. * That's the...
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First lot – Dyrham Park

So that I've got something to show, we'll start by going back a bit into the summer. These are from Dyrham Park near Bath, taken when I had a couple of days off in July. I'm a bit of a sucker for skies like this, especially when combined with a nice building like that. Nikon D200, Sigma 10-20mm lens at 10mm, 1/125 @ f11, ISO 100 I thought I'd dig out my (not terribly good) macro lens and get in really close to a few flowers. I really need to buy a decent macro, but that will have to wait. Anyway, a really vivid yellow.   Nikon D200, Cosina 100mm macro lens, 1/25 @ f11, ISO 100         There were an amazing number of dragonflies buzzing about the gardens. Most of them were small neon blue things, and they seemed to be hanging around in groups, shagging. But, there were a couple of real whoppers as well - totally impossible to photograph in flight, but they did helpfully land...
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