It's so depressingly dark and gloomy out there as there is no snow but the length of day is only 6 hours and 41 minutes. The sun rose at 8:43 and set at 15:24. The shortening of the day has already slowed down quite a bit but it will get even shorter: the length of day will only be 5 hours and 30 minutes at winter solstice a month from now.
I'm really hoping for a cold and snowy winter for at least part of the time. It would be cool to go and walk on lake ice to take shots.
But today's blast from the past will be a series of smartphone shots I took of bees and butterflies in my backyard with my iPhone on August 18 last summer.
Here's a link to the original:
@markkujantunen/a-gorgeous-day
It's about 23 C out there and the sky is completely clear. It's slighly warmer than average for the time of year. Autumn is a month away. But the nights are getting longer. It was only 11 C this morning at eight o'clock.
In Finland, the meteorological definition of summer is the 24-hour daily average temperature being persistently above 10 C. It coincides with leaves being fully grown on most deciduous trees in the beginning of the summer or them turning mostly yellow in the end of it. After mid-September frost at sunrise becomes fairly common but it may not be seen until much later in the autumn like last year. We're experiencing a fairly common type of late summer weather right now.
I took some photos in the garden.
The iPhone 7 has a pretty good camera. Taking these shots wasn't easy because the bees were rapidly moving nearly all the time. What helps is the abundance of light under this type of conditions. That allows for the exposure time to be extremely short and the motion of insects to be frozen like that.
Aglais urticae a.k.a. small tortoiseshell
