AUTUMN THROUGH THE SMC PENTAX-DA 35mm f2.8 macro limited

I miss the summer, though the autumn so far has been mild. I miss sunny days and warm evenings, flowers, birds, bee's, bugs and everything else that has now died, flown south or went under cover. (The photo is taken with the SMC Pentax-DA 10-17 fisheye zoom.)

The last few weeks it has taken much more fantasy to find targets for my macro lenses, which was first annoying because I was still trying out the new DA 35/2.8 macro limited lens. However, there are still motives enough. A few flowers have not yet given up, among them the yellow marigold, and a red flower which name I do not know, and the star-shaped blue flowers which name is "gurkört" in Swedish.

These photos are taken hand held at high ISO at low natural light one morning in September, benefiting from the shake reduction of the K20D body. The DA35/2.8 ltd offers a lot of sharp details even at these conditions.

There are also beauty in decaying flowers and in the fruits. Especially if you take the trouble to visit them when there is rain, morning dew or frost to enhance their beauty.

A rosehip fruit outside the school of my children.

If you look carefully there is also still some life left. In the raspberry bushes some garden snails still climb hiding in their shells. How does it feel to be a snail having to suffer a body temperature of a few degrees in the autumn nights? What do they do when the frost bites at night? Die?
The beautiful leopard snail is quite frequent in our garden. With its patterns and stripes it is a much more tempting photo object than the plain brown or black snails.

Here I had to use the built in flash since there were just too little light available. A tripod and long exposure times would have been an alternative, but the snails are not all that slow.

My oldest daughter was to help me in the garden one day, but she came back from the cabinet were we keep our gardening tools complaining that there was a spider on her spade. In Sweden we do not have very big spiders, so this one was impressive from our perspective.

Let's use this spider to take a look at the resolution of the DA35 ltd and K20D combo by cropping first the spider, then the spider mouth. As you can see, within the shallow depth of focus, the image is sharp down to the tiny hair on the spider tentacles. All hands-free with the built in flash.

One of these cold and rainy autumn days we found a butterfly hiding in our guest-room. Perhaps looking for a warm place to hybernate? I had not seen a butterfly for at least two weeks, but to my surprise, the week after I still saw a yellow butterfly. But there can't be many left now. The last few crickets stopped singing in our bushes two weeks ago, which I believe is unusually late (no pictures, they always goes silent when I come sneaking with my camera).

My final shot is a very tired bee that I found on the front window of my car one afternoon. It barely moved, and did not want to fly away. I had to lift it carefully and place it on a leaf of a nearby bush. I am so happy to be a mammal with a constant body temperature when the winter comes!