Naomi and the giant grasshopper

My mother was asked to housesit for someone with amazing garden so I obviously I had to snap some shots there! While crawling around (literally) with my macrolens ready I found some beautiful details to take pictures of. For one, this gorgeous big grasshopper! He was almost, if not just as big as my pinkie. He modelled very graciously for me. When I look at insects through my macrolens I always think of "James and the giant peach", one of my favorite movies as a kid. It's been at least six years since I've seen it but I still love all the characters. The smoky Miss Spider, Pop eye like Centipede, the posh Grasshopper who plays beautiful music on his violin etc... the songs in the movie are wonderful, as is the animation. Anyways, have fun looking at Mister Grasshopper in his natural habitat! And some other shots, of course. Hope you're having a wonderful summer!

I really recommend clicking on the images to see them in their full size! The detail in some of the shots is just astonishing, if I may say so myself. :-D

Experimenting with my aperture

This batch of pictures will be a little bit of a scramble of all kinds of things, mostly taken while playing with my depth of field. I really enjoyed it and I recommend anyone playing with a camera to play around with the aperture, it can really change the picture and the kind of atmosphere it breaths. Let me show you what I mean.

Here I have a picture where my aperture was pretty high (I'm not sure what number it was but I'm guessing between 6 and 9) and over here:

I had it at my lowest (2.8). See what a different kind of picture it is? To me, it looks a lot more like a soft, glittery fantasy world while the first picture is more like a picture of well, grass with raindrops. :-D Also, the second picture reminds me of Kokiri forest. For any Zelda fan out there, they totally remind me of the little firefly like thingies that you see flying around in Kokiri forest. They also look a little like the fairies! Maybe they're all little Navi's! Seriously though, even if you're not into videogames... the world that Shigeru Miyamoto has created inside Zelda... I wish I could live there, even if there would be skeletons and zombies out at night. More pictures!

Again, very low aperture.

Gaaah okay blogspot won't let me link from flickr so I'm gonna have to complete this post a little later. No worries though, I've got a bunch of pictures in store for you guys!
Edit: blogspot is my friend again! YAY! Now more pics for realz!

I love this one too, I was listening to 'as the world falls down' by David Bowie and this raindrop reminds me of those crystal balls he sends to Sarah in Labyrinth. After I listened to the song and thought of the crystal balls I immediately wanted to go watch 'Labyrinth' and I did! One of my favorite movies fo sho, Jim Henson was a freaking genius. I love 'The Dark Crystal' too, my dog, Mojo, is totally like a black Fizzgig. I get goosebumps whenever I hear the theme of the movie. And Skeksis are the creepiest things ever. OMG if I ever go to a halloween party I'm gonna go as a Skeksi! Or as Aughra! "Looks like Gelfling... *sniff sniff*... smells like Gelfling... maybe you ARE Gelfling! The best parts of my childhood are made by these creative geniuses like Jim Henson, Miyamoto... they are part of me. They might be mortal but I'm hoping that the things they did and stood for will never die.

Hope you enjoyed my pictures, I for one am very proud of them! :-)