Published

Back in the winter of 2022 I was contacted by Roger Morris, one of the authors of the WildGuide to British and Irish hoverflies, who asked if he could use my image of a Cheilosia Illustrata in the new edition of the book. I don’t suppose I need to tell you that I was delighted to be asked, and we quickly arranged for me to send him a high resolution copy of the file.

I always think of hoverflies as my gateway drug to macro photography: when I look back through my files it’s clear that they were one of the first types of invertebrate I ever tried to photograph, back in 2014-15 when I was doing my original 365. Pretty soon, photographing them wasn’t enough, and I wanted to know what they were, so I bought a copy of Ball & Morris, which is regarded as the absolute authority on hoverflies. Then I tripped over the UK Hoverflies group on Facebook, which is staffed by expert volunteers who help with tricky identifications, and siphon dated and grid-referenced records off to the UK Hoverfly Recording Scheme. By summer 2015 I was recording hoverflies in the Facebook group, and everything else I could manage to identify on iRecord, and I was addicted. As of now I have over 10,000 entries on iRecord (though 2,000 of them are still awaiting verification), and I have about another thousand images saved on my computer for sorting and uploading over the winter.

Anyway, back to Roger Morris. When he was looking for images for the new edition of the book he started by looking through the Facebook group images – a vast task, I would think, because it has nearly 7,000 members – and contacting the authors of any shots he thought might work. Which is how he came by my Cheilosia image. A couple of months later he emailed me and asked if I had any clear shots of either Merodon equestris or Rhingia rostrata, and I sent him some possibles, but I didn’t hear any more and eventually forgot about it. Publication was originally planned for last summer, but the book was delayed; and then delayed again, and again, and again. I’d had it on my Christmas list and R had been going to buy me a copy, but it became clear that it would be a Christmas 2024 gift, if I was lucky.

Then about a month ago Roger emailed again, asking for my postal address: the book was coming out at long last, and as a credited photographer I was due to receive a complimentary copy. I read the email to R in great excitement, but by this time the thing had assumed an almost mythical status in my head, so I kept on talking about it as though it might not happen: “IF it arrives…”, “IF it has my Cheilosia in it…”, and so on. Even when I received a shipping notification from the publisher I still treated it as a potential mistake, or a practical joke, and when the book dropped through the letterbox yesterday and I started to look for the photo credits I deliberately kept my expectations as low as possible. But there it was: Jill Orme [5]. Two credits for the Cheilosia, because the file was big enough for them to also extract a detail of the face; one for the Rhingia rostrata, one for the Merodon equestris, and a final one for another Merodon image (which I can’t now find, so I hope it actually was mine!) which they used to illustrate the many different forms of this highly variable species. It’s only half of one percent of the thousand images in the book, but to see those shots in print, and myself credited alongside people like Steven Falk, makes me so very proud and happy – people swim in freezing seas and jump off mountains wearing wing suits to achieve the kind of endorphin rush I’m experiencing right now, just sitting at my desk. And the cherry on the cupcake is seeing, among a host of photographers whose names I recognise, that of my good friend Richard Clifford, for a lovely illustration of the tiny and tricky Syritta pipiens.

So. I’m a published photographer. It warms my heart that since I posted about this on Facebook, family, friends and strangers have all been equally kind and complimentary. Someone in the SheClicks group sweetly said, “How fabulous that your images will be in pockets, bags, on bookshelves, have fingers traced over them, be referred to multiple times.. Great legacy.” And none of this would have happened if I hadn’t begun actively looking around for interesting things to photograph and discovered that insects fitted the bill – which in turn wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t decided to do that 365, and prove that I was doing it by uploading my daily images here. So thank you blipfoto: taking photos every day has made me a better photographer, talking about the things I post has made me learn about them, and discovering a passion for wildlife photography has brought me into contact, on and off line, with a community of like-minded people who are now a significant fixture in my life. I feel lucky, happy, and grateful.