Englishman in Bandung

By Vodkaman

Common butterfly

I had some business to take care of this morning. I received a final demand from the electricity people. I didn't pay last months bill because it interfered with my morning blipping schedule, then I soon forgot about it. I could pay the bill later in the day, but the police do random stop checks and when they see my pale complexion, it's like happy birthday time and they always stop me. It doesn't matter if I have everything perfect, they always get me for something and the only convenient way out is to pay a ten dollar bribe. The corruption situation is improving in Indonesia, but there are still problems, still, it often works in your favor.

I captured my first image at 08:39 and was back in the lab at 09:22 and a great session it was too. The sun was out, but I still used the rim light on some of the subjects. Within a couple of minutes I had collected a reasonable dragon shot and a butterfly shot, so my blip for the day was already secure. The furry bee was out and I managed to grab a couple of shots, but not holding my breath about the quality. The images are uploading as I type. Fired a couple of shots at the thin blue wasp, but again, not much hope, it just kept moving. A spider shot was captured, the black wasp and a couple of shots of the Chinese binomial darter.

Then the tiny red damsel fly arrived. I fired off a couple of shots before it flitted off, but I needed to be at minimum distance for the shots to be any good as she was only an inch long. Fortunately it landed close by again and this time I did a pretty good impression of a snake in the grass. Absolute stealth got me exactly where I needed to be.

Now that the shots are processed I am so disappointed that I failed to nail the damsel, especially having twenty shots to chose from, I really thought that this was going to be amazing, now it is relegated to mediocre and may not make it. The butterfly came out tops with the darter in second, but I'm going back, I can do better than this.

I added a small hopper with amazing leaf camouflage, a brown insect, a wasp and fly eyeballing each other, a brown butterfly and finally got close enough to blip the most common butterfly in the grove. All in all it turned out into quite a tedious blip day, I may be spoiling my own enjoyment by collecting too many images. In the end, the decision was not difficult, I'm just miffed about the damsel shot.

Update - found it! Common tiger - Danaus genutia.

Dave

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