What A Difference A Ray Makes

Never one to normally complain about the weather (people say I deliberately go on holiday to avoid heat or sun), I must say May up until yesterday was starting to pall a little, if not so much through lack of warmth but more through the dour lack of decent sunlight.

Last Sunday morning had been a typical example when I popped down to HESC for a couple of hours armed with camera and high hopes of a few interesting shots. Once again though, I was greeted by grey skies over a grey lake that was being whipped into a mini version of the North Sea by an uncharitably cold wind.

The hirundines and swifts didn’t seem to mind though and good numbers of swallows, house and sand martins wheeled and flicked across the lake surface suggesting there was a good hatch of flies taking place, even though the conditions appeared incompatible with such activity. After checking out all the usual spots I concluded that if was going to use the camera at all, then I may as well have a go at trying to take a few pictures of swallows in flight.

 Swallow over water by J R Hartley

Yes you’ve guessed it. Bad light, fast exposure times, high ISO speeds and rocketing birds = dull, colourless, grainy, swallow shaped blobs that after much fettling in photoshop, still remained reminiscent of poor hand drawn illustrations, in a 1950s cheap bird book. If there was a bright spot it was pretty much under my nose in the far hide, where a pair of Reed Warblers were nesting and a Reed Bunting posed (just out of comfortable lens range) now and again. On the walk back to the car a Whitethroat also showed himself fleetingly amongst the bushes, but connived to remain, a successfully reluctant pin-up.

Reed Bunting - I thought this picture reminded me of an illustration in one of the old ladybird books.

What a relief then, that things started to change so dramatically late Monday afternoon. The great golden orb finally appeared and along with its warmth came the emergence of a cornucopia of insects and the inevitable, increased bird activity. I even watched a fox sitting in the middle of a meadow, appearing to luxuriate in the warmth permeating his red brown coat, the pleasure was obviously so great that he could barely be bothered to lope away when he saw me.

Reed Warbler, LBJ Yes, but I think a very handsome little bird

I have promised myself that this year, I will try to learn a little about damsel and dragon flies and recognise a few more than the most common varieties of British butterfly. To this end I have therefore, ordered via t’internet, what I hope will prove suitable, pocket field guides (will let you know in due course). Despite not yet having received delivery of said books, I was pleased to be able to identify my first hairy dragon fly of the year (which my ever patient walking Odonata reference guide tells me was a female).

Hairy Dragonfly

This also gave me the chance, to again try out, my recently acquired macro lens. This is a new branch of photography to me and I had not initially appreciated how amazingly shallow the depth of field is on these lenses, particularly when you get in close. Despite a number of trials, tribulations and downright disasters, I find this a fascinating aspect of the art and hope to reveal in weeks to come, a few examples of my more successful shots, both in these pages and on my Flickr site and the FoHESC blog (see links).

Fly away home, the insurance underwriter is there to assess the flood damage.

Anyway that’s me done for this week. So long for now, the great orb is again rising high and digital hay needs to be made in the sunshine.