It is!

Thank you so much!

Right?!

Thank you! A proper camera (R7) with a 85mm lens :) I know some people manage great macro with their phones, but I couldn’t have gotten close enough with a phone, the bees hurried back into their tunnels whenever I got near.

You drive through the fields and spot a dishevelled young woman hunching over roadkill, reaching into the corpse with pliers as flies buzz around her. You accidentally make eye contact just as she - grinning - drops a writhing maggot into a translucent plastic bottle.

Why settle when I could get a 800mm 5.6 for a mere 14k?

The only reason I didn’t impulse buy a teleconverter to tack on my impulse bought 600mm is that it would just get me (more) underexposed pictures. But the urge is real, and we don’t even have bald eagles around here.

I saw some active webrings on neocities sites!

Try cloudhiker

Amazing scene! That must have been great to watch. Less so to hear!

A handsome boi!

Thank you, I love it!

So mossy. It’s beautiful!

The spiny flower mantis is gorgeous. It looks more like a piece of fantasy art than a real insect. Surreal.

Also, is your link possibly wrong on the “like this”?

Oh my god, thank you for that video, it’s fantastic. She’s so cute! I never saw a real mantis and this is fascinating.

… According to observations.be, they are present (albeit very rare) in Belgium, so I guess you’ve started me on a new life quest. 📸

The dots aren’t following you around :) They’re called pseudopupils. You’re seeing down the “tubes” (ommatidia) of the composite eyes (heavy oversimplification because I’m no scientist).

A smarter person explains this here: https://www.readingeagle.com/2015/09/16/outside-some-insects-look-like-theyre-looking-at-you-but-are-they

“Did they see me? Naaah. I am perfectly hidden behind this tall grass!”

Such a beautiful area. I love that golden light.

I saw php error logs cause a full disk in a few minutes (thankfully on a shared dev server), thanks to an accidental endless loop that just flooded everything with a wall of notices…

And, working with a CMS that allows third-party plugins that don’t bother to catch exceptions, aggressive web crawlers are not a good thing to encounter on a weekend… 1 exception x 400000 product pages makes for a loooot of text.

Thanks! I’ve been using observations.be (obsidentify) which usually gives great results. I’ll take a peek at iNaturalist :)