Hello my friends, 

I hope you had a good Christmas!

This week as it’s the last Friday of the year I thought that I’d create a little recap post with some of my favourite photographs taken in 2022.

So enjoy some black and white photography including ladybirds, butterflies and bumble bees.

In June I actually got some decent shots of a Holly Blue butterfly – I’d never seen one of these before – it had such stripy antennae! 

Letting the garden re-wild in the summer for #nomowmay was fun and it didn’t take long for insects to move in, there were so many ladybird beetles, I especially loved photographing them in the early morning.

I even grew my own wildflower ‘mini-meadow’ to encourage bees and really enjoyed watching them in the summer.

I spent a little time experimenting with different photoshop features while changing the photos to black and white which was fun and I really enjoyed manipulating the colours – I even learnt how to colour dodge!

I spent some time in Glastonbury at the old abbey, I could feel in my soul how important the place was and the people at the heritage trust do an amazing job at taking care of it.  

This was without doubt my favourite bumble photo of 2022 everything is in focus and the bee stands out against the flower.

By adding a sepia re-colour to the image and then playing with the dodge feature, I was able to create quite an autumn feeling version of this photograph!

All of my ladybird beetle photographs were taken over about three weeks. The majority were the red two spotted ones!

The Gatekeeper butterfly was most courteous and even posed for a few pictures and I really enjoyed photographing fungi right at the start of the year.

You can really see the butterflies features in this image – he has such big eyes! Even though this photo was originally taken in June and was of the Holly blue sitting on a bay leaf, it translated really well into an autumnal themed image!!

I was sitting in a grassy field when I photographed this Small White butterfly (Pieris rapea), it landed on a fox tail for maybe a minute before flying away! But the fluke of this image being perfectly in focus and the only one I managed to take was brilliant.

So yeah, there are my favourite photographs from 2022, did you have a favourite picture? I’ve actually put real effort into my blog this year (far more than I have in the past anyway) and I recently realised that I managed to post on 35/52 weeks – which is something of a record for me! 

But my resolution for next year is to post something every week.

Thank you so much for reading this post, and I wish you a Happy New Year!