Description

If you love to see the natural world close up, in all its amazing technicolour detail this is the ideal holiday for you! The tranquil and verdant area of Lake Kerkini and the surrounding mountains are the perfect place – full of butterflies & beautiful bugs ready to provide you with a feast of macro photography!

The area we visit is rich in diverse habitats within a relatively small area, making it a prime location for finding biodiversity. The habitats we’ll explore include Lake Kerkini and associated wetlands, flowery hillsides, alpine pastures and emerald green mountains covered in forests of beech, hornbeam, oak, black pine and oriental plane. In turn this diversity supports an equally rich flora and fauna, thus a wide range of different and exciting macro opportunities! There can be dragonflies and tree frogs close to the water, orchids and other flowers in the hillside meadows, along with a beautiful palette of colourful butterflies. And everywhere we go there is the chance to find other fascinating insects and other invertebrates, like praying mantids, longhorn beetles, katylids, spiders and much more.

The holiday has been designed to maximise the opportunities for macro photography by staying in one wildlife rich place for the week, where we can spend as much time as possible outside with our cameras. Our home for the week will be a comfortable hotel, close to Lake Kerkini. It provides the perfect base for our week of relaxing and fun photography in the wide open spaces and mountains that surround the beautiful Lake.

Oliver will offer advice and suggestions on how to capture intimate and interesting portraits of butterflies, spiders, insects and other invertebrates in their natural habitats. The kind of techniques that will be covered include: basics of macro photography; handheld stacking; working with natural light and tools to help optimise it; working with off-camera flash; composing your macro shots and digital workflow with Photoshop (you will need to bring your own laptop with software if you want help and advice on digital workflows). We will also have a second leader, who is an excellent all-round naturalist and photographer and who will help you to get more from the tour and understand the flora and fauna of the area.

Our daily schedule is kept flexible as we’ll want to take account and full advantage of the local conditions, which can be changeable due to weather, altitude and so on. We will however be intending to run numerous early morning and evening sessions, to take advantage of some great light and the fact that a lot of our macro subjects will be less active and thus easier to photograph and practice certain techniques, i.e. stacking.

The potential species to photograph are almost endless and there are always new discoveries made on each trip, but here is a selection of subjects and species that we have a chance to encounter… (check out the gallery for some example photos).

Butterflies

Southern White Admiral, Little Tiger Blue, Camberwell Beauty, Scarce Swallowtail, Eastern Festoon, Black-veined White, Eastern Bath White, Iolas Blue, Large Tortoiseshell, Nettle-Tree Butterfly, Marbled Fritillary, Spotted Fritillary, Queen of Spain Fritillary, Lattice Brown, Yellow-banded Skipper, Woodland Ringlet, Purple-shot Copper, Sooty Copper, Southern Comma & more.

Moths

Spurge Hawk-moth, Giant Peacock, Forester, Wood Tiger, Cream-spot Tiger, Yellow Underwing, Five-Spot Burnet, Nine-Spotted Moth, Six-Spot Burnet, Transparent Burnet, Puss Moth, Small Emperor Moth, Emperor Moth, Hummingbird Hawk-Moth, Olive Bee Hawk, Narrow-Bordered Bee Hawk & more.

Dragonflies & Damselflies

Green-Eyed Hawker, Blue Chaser, Broad-bodied Chaser, Southern Skimmer, Red-veined Darter, Balkan Goldenring, Lesser Emperor, Broad Scarlet, Yellow-winged Darter, Small Pincertail, Beautiful Demoiselle, Banded Demoiselle, Bladetail, Green Snaketail & more.

Reptiles & Amphibians

Dice Snake, Balkan Whip Snake, Salamander, European Glass Lizard, Common Wall Lizard, European Green Lizard, Hermann’s & Spur-Thighed Tortoise, European Terrapin, Green Toad, Common Toad, Tree Frog, Eastern Spadefoot, Yellow-Bellied Toad, Marsh Frog & more.

Other insects, beetles, spiders, grasshoppers etc

Ladybird Spider, Red-bellied Jumping Spider, European Praying Mantis, Fasciated Conehead Mantis, Balkan Spoon-Winged-Lacewing, Rose Chafer, Giant Centipede, Predatory Bush Cricket, Violet Carpenter Bee, various Robber Flies, Longhorn beetles & many more!