Has ‘an bollenessor’ turned into a macro photography-only blog? It seems so, I have not posted about my aquarium in ages. I still end up doing macrophotography when I go rockpooling. I tried wide-angle photography last week in the rockpools and failed miserably (so no photos for the blog). I hope to mix it up later in the year but for the moment here are some more macro photos. Above a picture I am quite pleased with: a solar-powered seaslug Elysia viridis on its favourite food the green seaweed Codium with some nice orange seaweed as a background. The pictures below show the snail Raphitoma purpurea (a first for me in Cornwall), the nudibranch Okenia nodosa (a lifer for me), a European Cowrie Trivia monacha and a patch of goby eggs (sans goby-egg eating seaslugs unfortunately).

I am a bit stuck in a limbo where on one hand I want to see interesting, new species and take good ID pictures (for recording on iNaturalist and sharing on facebook groups), but on the other hand I have gone a bit above my station and developed an interest in taking more ‘arty’ photos such as the solar-powered seaslug one at the top of this post. Sometimes the two aims converge. sometimes not. As an illustration of that, below a few shots of the nudibranch Polycera quadrilineata that ended up quite differently: a ‘good for ID’ photo but with an ugly cluttered background, a more arty photo (although the bokeh effect is due to backscatter and it is actually not that great), an overall ‘nice’ photo (posted before), a ‘shore studio’ shot of a slug (more about that in the next post) and an artsy fartsy version of a studio shot where the highlight have been so blown out that the slug basically is shown as a set of yellow stripes. I must say I can have ideas about how to take a certain shot, but my general approach is still ‘spray and pray’!