Lining up

"That's a big camera," said R, as he approached me along the river bank in Stratford. "What are you photographing?"

It was a bold move, I have to say. I'd imagine you can do someone quite a lot of damage, hitting them on the head with a large metal-barrelled lens, and I'd already had rather a trying morning. The problem with being an introvert doing a relatively unusual thing in a public place is that extroverts tend to want to talk to you about it, and while I always try to remember that there's nothing offensive about normal human curiosity, and exert myself (within reason) to be nice, by about the third conversation I'm generally feeling a bit tired and emotional.

It's not why I love them, but one of the qualities I appreciate about Odonata is that they're even shyer of human contact than I am, and if you want to capture detailed images you have to approach them very slowly and cautiously. I nearly said "quietly" there, but that's my own preference leaking through: although they can almost certainly sense vibration, damselflies and dragonflies have no organ of hearing, so you could yell at them till you were blue in the face, provided you kept absolutely still and didn't breathe all over them while you were doing it. It took me quite a while to edge into a position from which I could get this Banded Demoiselle sharp from stem to stern, but while I daresay some people would find that experience stressful, for me it was meditative and relaxing.

There's no accounting for taste.