Yesterday was an auspicious day to go for a walk along the banks of the small river that crosses the valley to the west of my village... My house is only half a kilometre away from that place so I only have to walk a short distance to be surrounded by low vegetation and trees...

"Red damselfly front view"
^{100 mm | 1/1000s | f/7.1| ISO 500}

"Butterfly"
^{100 mm | 1/1250s | f/7.1| ISO 500}

In my region, the rainy season has been longer than usual. So the riverbed still has plenty of water and the vegetation is still green. In addition, the ambient humidity is high and the direct sunlight is sometimes dimmed by some clouds... All this happening at the same time can only mean one thing: "Bugs, lots of bugs everywhere!"... And that, obviously, must be used for taking pictures... ;)

"Robber fly"
^{100 mm | 1/500s | f/7.1| ISO 640}

"Red damselfly side view"
^{100 mm | 1/1500s | f/7.1| ISO 500}

As usual in these cases, I took my camera with me and attached a 100mm fixed macro lens. Armed with this equipment, I took macro photographs by hand, without using a tripod or monopod and taking advantage of the available natural light as much as possible since it was around midday. Besides, I had to put up with a lot of bites, some dehydration and a lot of sweat on my clothes. But all this is easily forgotten after starting to take pictures and appreciating the lovely diversity of species available to photograph around the river.

"Red spider frontal view"
^{100 mm | 1/2500s | f/9| ISO 1000}

"Butterfly on my finger"
^{100 mm | 1/2500s | f/7.1| ISO 1000}

I was doing this for a couple of hours just walking within an area no more than 50m long and 40m wide on the river bank, that can give you a reference of how high species diversity is here in early September. I have many more photos and I will be sharing them successively, there are among them some interesting plant species as well.

"Green damselfly side view"
^{100 mm | 1/160s | f/11| ISO 1000}

"Butterfly on grass blade"
^{100 mm | 1/2000s | f/8| ISO 400}

As I usually do with many of my photographic works edited for colour, I also prepared monochrome versions to share with you here, so here they are below -(click on them to enlarge please).

I loved creating and then looking at the monochrome versions of these photos. There is something lovely about the body details of these specimens, and when magnified through the lens, they offer a lot of possibilities for veering into black and white and achieve an eloquent result.

ADDITIONAL TECHNICAL NOTE: Photographs captured with my Nikon D7000 DSLR camera in RAW format, then processed in Adobe Camera RAW for adjustments regarding light, sharpening, contrast and depth... The pictures are then exported to JPG format on which minor modifications such as straightening and adding watermarks were carried out using PhotoScape 3.6.3. and/or Photoshop

Thank you very much for your visit and appreciation!