NORTH DOWNS & BEYOND

The Blogger analytics figures report that, as of this moment, ND&B has been visited 3,044,462 times. On July 26th alone 20,385 of you clicked on your mice - or pressed your screen - to see what was going on. Nonsense I know. How many of these visitors were genuine human beings? I'll never know. How many were in reality carried out by an automated software programme, also known as a bot? Plenty I'd wager. Good for stats if this blogging lark was purely a numbers game, which as far as I'm concerned it isn't. To be honest it's all beyond me... Anyway, for those of you who are human I thought I'd do a little round up of the back garden mothing news. Here in Surrey we are still without rain (getting on for 40 days now) and the daily maximum temperatures are above 30C more regularly than are underneath it. The grass is burnt caramel, vegetation wilting. There is no good news here really, although perversely if you are running a moth trap you try and find a silver...

There has been much 'bigging up' and love shown for the Olympus TG7 camera recently, the reviewers raving about its macro facility and the fact that not only is it robust but it can also be used underwater. Although my current bridge camera is good for general photography (and is wonderful for birds at range) I must admit that it does not perform so well at the macro level. I recently spent some time in the field with Graeme Lyons who owns a TG7 and was blown away with the results that he got from such a modestly priced bit of kit - a tiny beetle that I could just about see revealed all kinds of form and pattern when its image was captured by the Olympus. Yesterday I purchased one. Early days and I've only just charged up the battery - however I hurriedly took a few sample images this morning and thought I'd share with you a couple of the results. One of the features of the macro (or microscope mode) is that you can set the camera to take a stack of shots of your flower...