Sabina Sabina

I awoke early and saw the stark shadows of the sun on the house opposite. This means that an early session is essential or it will get too hot and the harsh lighting will spoil all the shots, so I was out of the house by 07:00am.

The ground was soaked in dew, as expected and before very long I was slipping and slipping inside my flip-flops, I hate that. The dragons were already out and I seemed to be surrounded by green Sabinas, so reluctantly I decided to give them a go. I say reluctantly because I already have so many Sabina shots and have blipped them more than once before.

Sabinas are not easy to photograph, as they are a bit skittish and to get one shot you might have to get down and dirty a dozen or more times, it seems hardly worth the effort and with my aching bones, it is an effort. The reason that I have so many Sabina shots, despite the fact that they are difficult, is that you do not have to wait very long for the next opportunity, there are so many.

Unlike the orange dragons that fill the air and inquisitively buzz you, Sabinas are ground dwellers, hence their camouflage colors. They find a suitable perch, scan the sky for passing insects and occasionally leap into the air for a second or two, returning to the same perch.

I wouldn't normally even press the shutter release unless I was close enough to smell the dragons breath. I got my knee on the ground a few times, only for the dragon to move on, muttering to my self that this was just a waste of time. Then finally, I achieved full commando crawl and got within a foot of the hunting Sabina, with my elbows firmly planted in the mud, perfect.

A few times the dragon got spooked, but it only moved a couple of feet to another perch, so I was able to collect three different poses from the same Sabina. The shoot took ten minutes and I collected sixty images. I did want to capture the dragon looking up, but the head action is so fast and the shutter release lag is horrendously slow on this piece of sh camera. Ah well.

The session only lasted 25 minutes and I collected shots of a moth and a couple of St Andrews cross spider, but it seemed pointless continuing the session, with the Sabina shots in the can, so I called it a day. My confidence in a Sabina blip was not because I got up close or that I potentially had the best Sabina shots yet, but because the blip monster made me pay for the shots with a six inch rip in my pants.

I put a top view of yesterdays butterfly in folio, plus a couple of images that I had captured on previous sessions for those of you interested.

Dave