Day 283

I reckon I'm the only person in New Zealand who's not settling down to watch the final of the rugby world cup right now. It's been held in New Zealand over the past six weeks or so, and the country's been suffering from World Cup Fever. The NZ team, The All Blacks, are in the final. One of the reasons why I'm not watching the match is because Iain took the telly when he left. Although it wouldn't have done me any good even if he'd left it behind, because we don't get TV reception out here! I hope the All Blacks win, because most of my Kiwi friends will be thrilled if they do.

I had an open home today. Only one person turned up to view the house, and he didn't buy it! Still, it wasn't a complete waste of time, because I parked up down the road and took some photos of the wild flowers on the verge. I managed to get three shots that are good enough to share.

I find buttercups tricky to photograph. Their yellow is so intense that they can easily look 'blown out', even when they're correctly exposed. The cheat's method of dealing with this problem is to work in black and white, and bring up the blacks. This brings out the detail in the petals, and makes the background so dark that it's easy to make it totally black with just a few strokes with the clone tool in Photoshop.

Here's some sort of fly or hornet sucking nectar from a head of cow parsley. It was so intent on feeding that it stayed put for ages, letting me get dozens and dozens of shots. I hoped I'd luck out with at least one of them, and I did!

An opening floret of an unidentified wild flower, given a cross-processing treatment: