There was just one large female Golden-ringed Dragonfly out along the canal at Forest Farm this morning, but as female dragons often are she was secretive, hunting high and then disappearing into the foliage of an oak tree to perch, so I failed to catch her on camera. It’s now so late in the season that unless we get an Indian summer this might well turn out to have been my last Forest Farm dragon hunt of the year, so I was reluctant to leave with nothing, and spent a few minutes trying for flight shots of Common Darters. The combination of my good equipment and their propensity to hover meant that this wasn’t a particularly difficult quest, but most of them stayed quite a long way out from the bank, so their photos have needed heroic cropping. This male, on the other hand, was in possession of a small clearing in the vegetation just off the bank, and kept coming in too close, presumably to check if I was a rival who needed to be seen off. The ISO here shot up into outer space when he suddenly moved to an area that was much darker than I’d allowed for in my exposure compensation, but the new AI Denoise feature in Lightroom has made a pretty good job of softening the grain without over-smooshing the detail.
The Boy Wonder was in pretty good form today, considering that he has a cold, and was visibly more tired than usual even at the beginning of the day. He’d been given some Play-doh, and after asking me in bewilderment, “But what’s it for, though?” he rapidly got the hang of making “biscuits” and “sausages” and “pasta”, with various moulds, plus a squeezy gizmo that as far as I could make out is primarily designed to hide as much dough as possible within its innards so that you have to keep buying more. At one point he presented me with a “biscuit”, but when I said, “Oh lovely! Thank you. Can I eat this?” (meaning, of course, pretend-eat, which is what we’d all been doing for the previous half hour) he frowned at me as though I was becoming something of a trial to him, and said forbiddingly, “No. Because it’s Play-doh.”
After lunch we went to the playground, picking him up an ice lolly from the corner shop en route so that I didn’t have to spend another hour of my life in the queue at the kiosk in the park. By the time we reached the park he was a fetching pink and yellow all over, I had melted ice lolly all up both arms from trying to help him with the beastly thing, and every time the two of us touched we stuck to each other and had to peel ourselves apart. A small mountain of tissues and wet wipes was generated by the clean-up operation.
It was while we were in the park that he told me he didn’t want me to take any more photos of him. I explained why I take them (everyone who loves him wanting photos so that we can look at them when we’re not with him), and he listened quite politely and then said, “But I don’ want it though.” “That’s OK,” I said, “if you don’t want me to, I won’t.” I put the camera in my bag, and was fully prepared to leave it there, but a little later the Boy went to stand on the plinth of a carved wooden statue, and when asked he agreed that I could take a few photos of him there. R has just walked in laughing, and showed me a snap he grabbed on his phone at that moment, showing B in an extravagant pose, wearing a cheesy photograph smile, and with one finger winsomely resting on his chin – so I’m pretty sure the camera ban is conditional rather than outright. I suspect he’ll be looking for an agent quite soon, to negotiate rates on his behalf.
