Damsels not in distress

I braved the heat for a couple of hours this morning. That was all I could tolerate. I had already drunk 2L of water by then and the sun was so harsh it was ruining the photos anyway. So I came away with just a few nice frames today.

I shall start with 2 damselflies. The first one is an ageing male Orange-tailed Midget. You can tell it is like me, getting on a bit, because the dorsal surface of the thorax is pruinosed pale bluish white. The uniform colour of the front and hindwing pterostigma reveal it is not Agriocnemis pygmaea. 

Agriocnemis femina oryzae

The second one is Common Bluetail – female. I struggled to get close enough to this one.

Ischnura senegalensis

To finish, two dragonflies. I managed a head on shot of the Forest Chaser this morning. Very tolerant it was.

Lyriothemis elegantissima

It was quite deep in the shade but you can still see the gorgeous green metallic sheen to the frons. My reference text describes the rest of the face as pale yellow but I think creamy white looks more like it here. Incidentally no HK dragonfly enthusiast should be without Keith Wilson’s “Hong Kong Dragonflies” published by The Urban Council in 1995.

Finally an image I would not normally keep but I know people outside HK like this species so I offer it up despite the limited DoF.   Russet Percher.

Neurothemis fulvia

That was the last one I shot before heat exhaustion overtook me and I conceded defeat. No odes were hurt in the making of this blog post but the photographer nearly was 😦

Now we head into a massive sporting weekend. Wales against Australia for the last game of the Lions tour tomorrow, the Wimbledon finals and hopefully another chance for Andy Murray to win if he can get through a tough semi today. Whatever happens there will still be photos to search out on Monday.

Neurothemis fulvia

For those of you watching in B&W, Neurothemis fulvia is in the red kit 🙂

Russet percher – close up

Russet percher

One dragonfly today – Neurothemis fulvia, the Russet Percher.

These are quite skittish but by kneeling on the boardwalk for 20 minutes and keeping quite still this dragonfly continued to return to the same perch in between fending off intruders.

Neurothemis fulvia

These get quite scruffy and this one was in reasonably good shape. They don’t look as good when  the wing colouring has faded. I used fill flash to bring out the colours.

My second shot is another view of the LNEC with the back drop of the hills behind. I was testing my new 70-200mm F4 IS lens today and this was one of my efforts. The only minor issue is that is it has no tripod collar but it is so light that it can be mounted on the camera body, itself attached to the ball-head and it does not seem in the least front heavy or unstable.