The August 2001 edition of Practical Photography came with a free 36-exposure Kodak Elite Chrome Extra Colour 100 slide film. The suggestion was that it should be used to take nature or wildlife photographs, which would then be eligible for a competiton being run by the magazine. I'm not sure whether I've got a winner among this lot, but I'm quite pleased with them.
The picture on the top left is probably the best one: amazingly, this is cropped from a slide where the dandelion occupies only the centre, and it was a hand-held shot using some, but not all, of my extension tubes.
The picture on the top right is part of a budleia flower. The thumbnail is close to life size. The budleia flower was harvested and taken indoors out of the wind, where I set the camera up on the tripod and used all my extension tubes with my 50mm lens for maximum magnification.
The picture on the bottom right is a rose from my garden, which was photographed still on the bush, with the use of a tripod and some of my extension tubes.
The picture on the bottom left is some close-up detail from a wasp's nest Stephen found in my porch roof when he was doing some work up there. He saved it for me, and I took it out in the sun and used all my extension tubes to magnify it and bring out the different layers of colour created by the wasp.
I think that is the best wasp's nest picture I took, but here are two more whcih deserve an honourable mention!
One afternoon early in September, Stephen found a ladybird on a piece of wood he was working on. We transferred it to a beech leaf and I got the camera set up on a tripod with the extension tubes out. Here's the best of the bunch of pictures I took.
