I am a forestry researcher, now partly retired, and amateur photographer living in Banská Bystrica, Slovakia. Most of my pictures were taken here, however, my city is located in the Carpathians, which means a variety of habitats, from warm and dry ones to cold mountain valleys. I plan to add this information into the photostream, but it will take some time (maybe after I retire).

My macros were taken by small Panasonic cameras, the older ones by DMC-TZ35, newer by DMC-TZ100 with a larger sensor and peaking focusing. This means I need to go as close to the object as possible. TZ100 allows 5 cm at "44 mm" focus length. So far, all my pictures are taken "in the wild", with free hand. I do not capture insects for later photographing. At most, sometimes, I tear the leaf with the insect off and move it to better light conditions.

All my pictures are post-processed in GIMP (curves, shadows&higlights, levels, sharpening). I usually improve bokeh by free hand blurring or Gaussian blurring of the selected area. Another method I use is to reduce noise and to erase a hole for the object in the mask. leaving thus noise reduced only in the background. Quite recently I have learned to use plugins for shadows and highlights recovery.

All my pictures are under Creative Commons license CC BY 2.0, including those license of which I have forgotten to change.