I decided to go to Croome today, on the grounds that it must surely be dragonfly city by now, but sadly it wasn’t. To be fair, there were many scores of damselflies around, but most were teneral and all were skittish, and in this afternoon’s harsh light hardly any of them photographed well. By the time I’d trudged around the entire perimeter of the watercourse I’d taken over two hundred photos, but since processing them I’ve deleted all but eight. On the plus side, I got lots and lots of steps. And then some.
This, as I’m sure you’ll have realised immediately you saw her, is a female Blue-tailed Damselfly, form rufescens. I wasn’t wholly convinced about this scene when I took the photo, and I’m still troubled by that left-hand bud – I may yet go back to the the file with a large pair of scissors and get rid of it altogether – but leaving aside the question of whether the photo was worth taking in the first place, I do think it’s astonishing that today’s cameras can work with light as extreme as this and still produce acceptable results. I’m as capable as anyone else of finding modern technology screamingly frustrating (WHY won’t the television do what I tell it to? WHAT is Freely, and WHY do I have to use it, when all I want to do is press a number and get a channel???), but modern camera equipment is absolutely brilliant.
R: L2, C10, D1*.
