Migrant Hawker

I broke the 100-400 zoom back out of storage today, and went off to Stratford to see if I could get some flight shots of Migrant Hawkers. The sunshine came and went, and so did the hawkers - I know from extensive experience that you can't hide from the wraparound eyes of a dragonfly, but even so it surprised me just how quickly they clocked that I was pointing a large lens at them, and went off to hunt somewhere else - but despite the high ISO in this shot, I'm not unhappy with it. I've always loved the way this lens renders water, and it's the sense of movement here that's caused me to pick it over some less grainy but more static-looking images. I processed it in Lightroom, which is notoriously poor at handling Canon raw files, but then cleaned it up in Topaz Sharpen AI, which is pretty good at dealing with noise as well as blur.

I spent two mindfully happy and relaxed hours in Stratford, hunting Odonata along the south side of the Avon between Lucy's Mill and Breakweir Lock, and at one point I even found myself humming If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands - though you'll be relieved to hear that I managed not to do the accompanying actions. Personally, I was just relieved that I'd managed to stop singing A windmill in old Amsterdam, which has been running round and round my head like a demented hamster in a wheel, since I downloaded it the other day to add it to Baby B's playlist. If I've just passed on that earworm to you, I can only apologise.

On my way back to the car I was attacked by a butterfly, for the first time ever in my life. As The Red Admiral in tonight's extra whirled around me and bounced off my t-shirt, I realised that it was trying to move me away from the windfall plums on which it had been gorging, and said to it severely, "Go home, Red Admiral - you're drunk." It was determined to keep the plums to itself though, so rather than fighting with it I stepped over the plummy mess on the path, and then knelt down and waited for it to return to its feast. Whether the wasp in that photo was merely stupefied, or had actually died of a surfeit of plums, I didn't stop to investigate - though I did notice some other wasps coming and checking it out, which made me think that if it was still alive it might find itself in trouble, when it turned up back at the nest late and with a massive plum hangover.

I've posted a handful of my other dragon photos on Twitter, if you'd like to see them.