Boring

Woke up at 4.30am, still couldn't get back to sleep by 5.30am so I got up. Had a shower etc. and then went on a walk at 6.30am to try and find some butterflies to photograph. Before I went out I checked in the back garden in case there were any interesting bugs there that would save me having to go on a possibly point cheese walk.

I went down to the fields below Willow way. My efforts weren't very successful initially, and I saw a soldier beetle and ladybird but no butterflies. I was looking in a long grass field since other people often post pictures of them asleep on pieces of long grass or other similar plants.

Later I found a bumble bee asleep on a small ox-eye type daisy. I didn't take my tripod, and so needed to use some fill flash to lighten up the dark bits. Unfortunately, although I packed my flash I must've taken the batteries out of the flash case and also the spare batteries that should've been in my bag weren't there. I also couldnae be bovvered to use my D200 as it would mean having to put my camera bag down on the wet ground to get all the stuff out. When we move I Tom Hink I might get a LowePro Slingshot, hopefully should make adding filters etc. to my cameras much easier.

After that I found a butterfly which flew around a bit, I followed it and waited till it landed, then tried to take it's photo but my camera couldnae focus close enough so I added the MCON-35, which meant I had to get quite near (35cm) to the butterfly for the camera to be able to focus. I frightened the butterfly a few times, but just followed it to where it landed and then was able to get quite a few shots.

After that I carried on walking , saw some rabbits and also I stood still for a bit to look round, and then a collared dove flew from just by my foot - somehow I didnae notice it when it was on the ground. A bit further on I saw a gatekeeper butterfly that I took some photos of. Then near the houses I saw some grasshoppers, and they actually hopped from one blade of grass to another. Got some photos of one of them as well.Then there was a bloke walking a dog so I walked the rest of the way home. People had nice flowers in their gardens but I didnae see any bugs. When I got home I went into the back garden, and there were bugs now. I took photos of some flies and also another gatekeeper butterfly and a speckled wood butterfly.

After that I came in and looked at the pics on my PC. They were okay unzoomed, but at 100% they were quite blurry. Pobasquish because I took all the photos handheld instead of with a tripod.

I ate a bit more food and did some work work for a couple of hours then at 12pm mem, mum, dad, Ben and Manveer went to have lunch on the beach. We went to Portslade but it was totally cold and windy and also clouds kept going over and blocking the sun. After that Dad dropped off some old stuff we didnae want at Emmaus Second hand superstore, then we went home.

When we got home I did a bit more work work and just went on the pinternet and beed bored. I also tried taking close-up photos of a wasp I killed.

I took 3 close up photos & tried to stitch them - PTGUI said it couldnae find any control points and autopano SIFT plugin didnae work so I downloaded autopano pro, saved as a .pts file then stitched in PTGUI. Had to do quite a bit of PP in PS as well.

I also found that when using robogeo to geotag images through google earth it was always putting the co-ordinates up and to the right a bit of where the crosshair is. This doesn't matter if you geotag when zoomed in close, but if you're zoomed out it can create quite a large error. I checked the robogeo webpage to see if there was an update to fix this, but apparently the problem is with google earth. There isn't a newer version of google earth than the one I had, but on the robogeo website it said you should use version 4.0 or below of google earth, so I managed to find a 4.0.something version of google earth, uninstalled the newer version and installed the older version. Is annoying since I've already geotagged loads of photos using google earth (and quite a few of them I tagged zoomed out, so may have large errors) but at least now I hopefully can geotag the rest of my photos accurately.

When sorting and tagging some recent photos, I also had a pic of me eating a happy hippo, deleeeeeeeeee!

After dinner I did washing up cleared the table, went on my comp for a bit, played excite truck against Ben, watched The Queens guards and Coast.

Now it's about 11pm and I'll go to bed.

Food
Breakfast: Strawberry Jam toast sandwich, cup o' tea.
10am snack: Banana, Pop tart, cup o' tea.
Lunch: Ham with mustard and salad sandwich, Cheese with ham and salad sandwich, rich fruit cake, small sultana sponge cake with icing and half a glace cherry on top, twix finger, satsuma.
Dinner: Cheese & Tomato pizza, Ham & Pepperoni pizza, salad, chips. Pudding was 2 x tesco american style chocolate brownie cookies - delee! Coffee.