Common Brimstone-Gonepteryx rhamni

One of the finest Butterflies we have over here in The Netherlands is the Common Brimstone (Gonepteryx rhamni). It is however hard to find and with the past few years being very bad Butterfly years i had little hope of finding one soon. But then my good friend Bart Stornebrink told me he knew of a good place for Butterflies and as this year is eceptionally good for Butterflies compared to the last few years i was hoping for some good results of the Common Brimstone in particular.

We head out to his Butterfly place yesterday and on arrival there where loads of Butterflies flying around including the not so "common" Brimstone!

So here's some of the results;





We also found other species so here's some of them too;

The Roe Deer Workshops-Report

Have been hosting my Roe Deer workshops over the weekend and had a great morning and evening with a lot of cooperative Roe Deer.
In all we have been able to shoot around 40GB in 2 days wich is more then i could have imagined.

Here's just a couple of shots from this weekend's sessions to give you an impression of the workshops. If you are interested in joining me on one of my Roe Deer workshops just send me an e-mail at: info@jeroenstel.com








And some more...





There's more where that came from...





And that's not all....





But my absolute favorites must have been these wich we have photographed with some backlight after a good meal...

The Extremist is back...

With the real thing this time...

Finally my new toys arrived being the Canon MP-E 65mm F2.8 Macro and the Canon MT 24 EX Twin Flash. A set of gear i have been dreaming of using ever since i started my many macro experiments years and years ago..

Ofcourse i can get similar or even more extreme results using the rversed lens technique but this is so much easier to work with and does not give me a headache from peeping through a 2mm small diafragm hole into a bright shiny LED light.

The other thing is that i can start at 1:1 and work my wy up to 5:1 or more using my macro extension rings or a converter.
I do feel that working 1:1 at 65mm is very hard as insects tend to run or fly of when you get that close so for the 1:1 stuff my Sigma 150mm F2.8 regular Macro lens will still be the best solution. For extreme macro however this is the set to use!


Handling the MT 24 EX Twin Flash is another thing as i found out and like most macro flashes it produces way too much light. Diffusion is the thing to do so in order to get accurate diffusion i now have made a set of semi transparent diffusers from an old film roll box wich seal of the flash heads and on top of that a pair of the trusted Gary Fong Puffer diffusers and this combi seems to give me the best results. One of the flash heads has also been modified by placing it higher using a Kaiser hot shoe adapter. That way i can avoid specular highlights as the flash heads are not at the same angle.

Nocturnal adventures

Or rather..."Athena noctua"...

My cousin Conrad (see his website at: www.conradpauw.nl) had recently been working on a Little Owl project and invited me to join him for an evening. This was just before the juveniles flew out of the nest so there was a lot of feeding activity going on.


Unfortunately....for me... (not for him that is..) my cousin went on a holiday and we just missed the actual flying out of the chicks. But yesterday he invited me over for another evening of Little Owl photography as there where still some chicks around. I was surprised that after more then 2 weeks the chicks where still in the area but when we arrived we had some good chances at photographing one of the chicks right away.

The rest of the evening was a little harder as the Owls did not show themselfs well and the temporary hide was a bit too small resulting in some ackward positioning all evening long..


In all i had a great time on both occassions and got home with a nice series of Little Owl images of wich i will share a few over here with you.