Fragile Beauty

Today is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Rememberance Day, a day that has a lot of meaning for me. Today and always I honour the children in our hearts and never (or too briefly in) our arms.

What better symbol to represent our lost babies than the fragile beauty of a butterfly who stands also for rebirth and transformation? In the spirit of that, and acknowledgement of the transience of life, today's image is a butterfly I photographed while in the UK.

A butterfly rests upon her lunch:

I caught this image while at the British Natural History museum, at the butterfly exhibit they had running at the time. I managed to get a couple of nice photos that day, despite the notorious difficulty of capturing these fluttering beauties, this is one of my favourites.

To get this, I set my camera to Manual but with Macro set to on, then adjusted the aperture and shutter speed settings. I believe this one was taken at an ISO of 100, but I fiddled with the aperture and shutter speed so much on the different butterfly photos I was trying to take that I've not a clue what I settled on with this particular shot.

Season's Greetings

Happy new year!

Again, apologies for the unintended hiatus. Let's hope I can do better this year!

Jelly spill in Christmas colours:

Almost everybody that celebrates it has a favourite Christmas tradition or two; one of mine is that every year either my mother, or I, or both of us together, make trifle. We usually use both red and green jelly, and this year was no exception - although this year our trifle was a bit smaller than usual, which turned out quite lucky as we spilled about half of our green jelly! Apparently it's bad form to lick it off the drainage board, though... so don't worry, I used a spoon! ;)