Sauntering Vaguely Downward

And now, actual butterflies!

Two-tailed pasha and malachite, feeding on an orange.

( Many butterflies, mostly identified. )

Keiki pondering the Loire last Easter. Also, h/t susandennis, without your workaround tip the late evening photo post from beneath the duvet would never have happened. 😉🥂

I had four rolls of film sitting on my desk for nearly all of last year and I finally got up the gumption to send them off to be developed. This is a favourite - it's Keiki chucking rocks at the sea on Whitby Beach in January last year. It was 15 degrees C that day, which is not a typical temperature for the north of England at this time of year.

The film was very expired when I popped it in the camera, let alone had it developed, so the fogginess and odd colour palette are not surprising.

I got some Polaroid 600 film refills for my camera. Polaroid had a 50% off sale prior to Christmas and I spent a lot of time dithering over cameras until the bloke said, “You already have one, why don’t you spend that £50 on the film you want to shoot rather than on another camera?” Fair point, I thought, so I did. I bought the blue and yellow duochrome films.

It’s proven useful over the school holidays, as it helps to motivate the kids out for a walk, and to look carefully for the one or two shots they’re going to take with the camera. They’re used to being able to take a zillion shots with a phone or dSLR camera, so planning and saving up their film for a shot they really want to take keeps them engaged in the activity.

Some results below.






The film develops very differently depending on the ambient conditions. On the 22nd, it was cold (near 0 degrees C) and dry, so we allowed the films to develop as we carried them around. They bleached out in patches. On the 24th, it was warmer (around 10 degrees C) and a little damp, but not raining, so we let them develop in the air as above and they turned out better. Yesterday (the 27th) it was cold again and raining continuously, so I brought a camera bag and placed the films in an envelope to develop. The bag got wet and the envelope was decidedly humid when I removed it on our return home. The toning is very different, dark and rather sombre.

[YouTube video, 00:19 long, infrared capture of hedgehog]

Last week, I remembered that we still have a motion-triggered video camera, which was gathering dust in the bloke's office. Figuring that our hedgehog was probably awake now, I dug it out, replaced the batteries - it takes eight AAs and it munches through them at a rate of knots - and asked the children to choose a place to put it.

We tried it up by the playhouse at first, as we're pretty certain the hedgehog hibernates and lives either under it or very near it. That didn't net us any footage, so we moved it to point at the ground beneath the bird feeders. Bingo! Hedgie every night. We have a lot of clips now, which I want to stitch together over the bank holiday weekend, but for now, please enjoy this little gem. Poor Mr Snuffles has got an itch that needs scratching.