Southern Hawkers are well known for their habit of flying up to humans and stopping mid-air to look us over, but Migrant Hawkers aren’t generally that forward and it’s quite unusual for one of them to do it. Today though, I was photographing the dragons around the various reed beds at Lucy’s Mill in Stratford when I noticed that this male Migrant kept coming over and checking me out.
I wasn’t confident of getting this shot because a head-on dragon doesn’t present much of a target for the autofocus to catch hold of, but the third or fourth time he came and hovered in front of me I decided to give it a try, shooting a burst of frames while turning the manual focus ring. After my new friend banked away I checked to see what I’d managed to capture, and was delighted to find that two shots in the middle of the sequence were well focused on his face and eyes. In fact I was so pleased that I packed up at this point and went home, certain that I wasn’t going to be able to better those two images today.
