Dragonfly

This is a first for me: I've finally bagged me a shot of a dragonfly. I've never had much luck with these beautiful creatures, so I was delighted when I saw one fly in to my garden while I was having a ciggie. Fortunately my camera was downstairs and just happened to have my Sigma 120-400 lens on it. I dashed inside, dashed back outside, fully expecting the dragonfly to have flown away.

It was still there, so I started firing away getting closer and closer. Never having really used the '400 for this kind of photography, I was quite surprised how close I could get with it. For this shot I had to give up on the auto-focus - it spent far too much time hunting - so this was manually focused. Just a pity it couldn't have landed on something with better contrast :)

Not knowing much about dragonflies in general, I thought I'd look it up on the British Dragonfly Society. I'm reasonably certain now that it is some form of Hawker dragonfly, but can't quite nail the correct species from the tail.